IT Briefcase Exclusive Interview: The Future of Huddle and The Cloud Collaboration Market

The cloud collaboration software industry has been developed quickly over the past few years, with new key players breaking into the market every year, looking to upset the status quo and change how we work and communicate. We’ve seen enterprises in particular adopting BYOD and enterprise mobility for various reasons such as increased efficiency, reduced IT expenses, and real-time responses.

As we enter the last couple of months of 2016 and look ahead, we caught up with Morten Brøgger, the CEO of Huddle, the secure enterprise cloud collaboration company, to get his thoughts on the future of the market.

• CJ: How does Huddle stay relevant in a crowded market?

Morten: Our vision. We view ourselves as enabling the Networked Enterprise – the future worker having Predictive Information pushed to them – a vision way beyond collaboration.

Our security prowess. Today’s enterprise wants more security, not less. Huddle was built on a strong foundation in security with more and higher security accreditations for its public cloud service than any of the players in the market. It’s the reason we count 80 percent of UK government departments, NASA, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Institutes for Health, and other agencies across the U.S. Federal Government as customers.

Our focus. Concentrating on markets where we are well suited, specifically professional Services and UK + US Government, has allowed us to build our product around the needs of our customer base, making us all the more relevant to those markets.

• CJ: What does Huddle’s future look like?

Morten: Huddle will lead the transformation of the collaboration market to a predictive ecosystem powering the Networked Enterprise.

We will continue to serve clients in heavily-regulated, security-focused industries like large Advisory Firms and Government institutions, helping these firms put collaboration at the heart of their business and allowing them to easily expand their brand and their services.

• CJ: What is missing from the market right now (maybe including from Huddle)?

Morten: From a collaboration perspective, I’ll again return to “predictive”.  From search results to friend requests, predictive algorithms define our lives online. Yet where money matters most, predictive solutions have not yet gained much traction. This will change over the next few years. To drive this vision forward, there will need to be close collaboration between all parties in the ecosystem – from SSO vendors over CMS vendors to UC vendors. Huddle is surely helping set that agenda in the cloud eco-system

• CJ: Name a company (other than Huddle) that’s disrupting technology in general and why?

Morten: Qordoba. Qordoba is a platform that is using machine learning to help companies automatically create marketing and product copy.

They have a collaborative platform that allows copywriters and marketers to edit, publish and optimize this content without any engineering or coding required. Marketers get to learn what is actually working in their products and on their websites and feed that learning back to the content engine and copywriters. Gartner is forecasting that 20% of all content will be generated via algorithms by 2018, and Qordoba’s bet is that companies will need workflow and collaboration around that to really make use of it. Users of their software include PocketGems, Cartier, Visa, Pinterest, Airbnb. They’ve very quietly recruited a top machine learning engineering team. Definitely a company you will be reading more about in the next 12 months.

Author Bio:

CJ Arlotta is a freelance writer the former Executive Editor of Talkin’ Cloud, one of Penton Technology’s web properties. He joined Penton in 2013 and first reported for Talkin’ Cloud. Prior to that, Arlotta was a contributing editor to other Penton websites.

Interviewee Bio:

Morten is Huddle’s CEO. Based in San Francisco, Morten brings more than 20 years of experience in the technology industry and extensive go-to market and SaaS experience, spanning the US and European markets, to Huddle.

Prior to joining Huddle, Morten was CEO at MACH, a provider of hub-based mobile communication solutions. In this role, Brøgger led MACH’s growth and acquisition by Syniverse in 2013 for $715 million, and subsequently served as Chief Sales Officer for the combined business globally. At MACH, Brøgger brought new cloud services to market, accelerated business into adjacent markets and achieved the highest customer and employee satisfaction in the history of the company.

Brøgger’s previous experience includes leadership roles at Sunrise Switzerland, TDC Denmark and ATEA. He holds a M.A. degree from Aarhus University’s Business School in International Marketing Management.