Enterprise Collaboration Wars Lessons for SaaS startups

It’s going to be fun to watch the enterprise collaboration wars and how each company is approaching the market! In my mind it is a microcosm of many battles being played out with startups versus incumbents. Do large enterprises go for “best of breed” providers or the “one throat to choke” model? How does the bottom-up model work versus the traditional top-down enterprise sales model? As for collaboration, here is a view of some of the players:

  1. Slack – bottom up, adding enterprise features, but not on-prem yet, many early adopter enterprises but can they bridge gap to more traditional
  2. Microsoft – Teams, product not as fleshed out but starting with bases of thousands of enterprise clients due to enterprise company licenses, does that mean adoption?
  3. Box/Dropbox – coming at it from a technically commodity base layer of file sharing and storage, trying to add stickiness on top with Paper by Dropbox and Notes from Box
  4. Google – has Gsuite for Google Cloud – do they add a collaboration layer or do they just buy someone else?
  5. Salesforce – has Quip, do they keep adding layers on top?

and many others…

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