Andrew Patel didn’t get the west-side window office he wanted when his company moved into its new Santa Ana headquarters,his feng shui coach told him to put the conference room there instead but that doesn’t seem to perturb the entrepreneur too much.
If his newest venture, huddle247 Inc., is half as successful as he hopes it will be, his office location won’t matter at all. In fact, the concept of being chained to a desk could go the way of manual typewriters, carbon copies and the 9-to-5 workday.
The company is closing in on $10 million in venture funds as it launches a web-based office-collaboration service and a search for an executive team to lead the 2-year-old company.
Patel, who came up with the idea while stuck in traffic two years ago commuting to his job as chief financial officer at a recruiting firm in El Segundo, has invested close to $1 million of his own money and attracted another $1.65 million from Hambrecht & Quist.
The service stores documents remotely and helps coordinate group projects online, allowing workers dispersed anywhere around the globe to collaborate as if they were sharing the same internal computer network. Users access the documents and project updates through a personalized web page that keeps track of updates and deadlines.
“What we have is the opportunity to define how people do business,” says the 32-year-old. “We’re really pioneers.”
In a broad sense, however, the concept isn’t new. Several web-based firms including HotOffice, Kinjo, Project.net and even Yahoo!, offer similar services for free. But Patel says none provide a comprehensive package of document sharing, web conferencing and project management tools.
With offerings that include an online calendar, personal information manager, conferencing software, instant messaging and bulletin boards, Patel is confident huddle247 offers an easier-to-use interface and more complete solution for an increasingly mobile workforce.
The venture is Patel’s second Internet startup. He “lost a bunch of money” on an online grocery delivery service called GroceryExpress.com a few years ago, but learned how to manage software development in the process.
The company’s other co-founders include former Boeing engineers Mansik Johng, who oversees product management, and Tony Velleca, who spearheads the development process.
Some of huddle’s more advanced features include full Microsoft Office integration and the ability to view and annotate more than 255 types of documents from any web browser, even if the user doesn’t have the software used to create the file. Patel’s engineering team created a viewer that handles everything from Microsoft Word files to CAD (computer-aided design) files from sophisticated but obscure applications.
Patel practices what his company preaches: his 18-person engineering staff in India and the 36-or-so workers in Orange County use the service for all company business. The company originally tried to create a web-enabled version of an existing workgroup collaboration package but found the process too expensive and time consuming. Instead, he hired the Indian engineering and testing team and started his own from scratch.
The service is free for 90 days and costs $10 per month for each “huddle” workgroup, plus $5 per month for each user connected to the system. Each huddle comes with 50 megabytes of storage space.
“We have a solid goal for profitability,” Patel says.
Indeed, IDC Research estimates the market for online collaboration tools to be 21 million users and growing.
Despite a slew of competitors that offer office collaboration services free, Patel says huddle247 is worth the price because of its simplicity and industrial-strength reliability. The company uses well-known hosting provider Exodus Communications and for security, Verisign Inc., TRUSTe and Nedek Computer Systems.
Patel plans to target customers through co-branded versions of the service with banks, high-speed Internet access providers and others. The first such deal is an agreement signed recently with small-business web site Entrepreneur.com. Patel hopes to have 500,000 users by year’s end.
He says he’ll add to that by focusing on three initial segments of small and mid-size corporations: professional services; architecture, engineering and construction; and manufacturing design and development.
Although Patel acknowledges it could be tough to sell businesses on the idea of trusting mission-critical data to a system they can’t see or touch, growing acceptance of the remotely hosted application service provider model is making the idea less radical than it would have seemed just a few years ago.
And once customers see the benefit of not having to install a new system while gaining global access to their data and a virtual-office environment, he contends, they’ll gladly pay the monthly fee.
Patel is working on additions to the service that would provide an online procurement function and a knowledge-management module that would help companies keep track of information they’ve acquired over long periods of time.
“It’s our goal to enable users to work on their terms,” he says.n
