Cloud Startup Offers Comprehensive Business IT Platform
Most organizations don’t want their employees doing too much social networking at work. But in a fresh approach to combining the cloud with social computing, a startup named Bitrix24 has released a platform that integrates project management, file syncing, social networking, CRM and more into one package designed for the workplace. It’s an ambitious idea, but is it crazy enough to succeed?
In terms of functionality, Bitrix24 doesn’t do anything very new. Each of its individual features is already available from other platforms. What makes Bitrix24 stand out, however, is that it combines a very disparate set of software tools into a single product, aiming to provide a one-stop, comprehensive solution for collaboration and communication within businesses.
In some respects, an approach such as this seems to fly in the face of hard-learned lessons from decades of IT development. As any Unix purist will tell you, for instance, it’s better to focus on doing one thing very well than trying to do everything as best you can. If it weren’t, we’d probably see Microsoft manufacturing PCs, or Apple selling word processors.
Generalizations aside, however, Bitrix24 might be a good fit for some organizations, particularly smaller ones. For those customers, the platform offers two strong advantages: It’s free to use (in its basic version; paid editions offer extra functionality) for businesses with fewer than 13 employees, and it runs totally in the cloud, eliminating the need for maintaining the dedicated IT infrastructure and staff that small organizations can rarely afford.
Meanwhile, Bitrix24’s scope is limited enough to avoid the kind of unchecked feature bloat that often accompanies platforms that try to be too many things at once. Despite its coverage of a range of feature areas, the product focuses solely on providing solutions for collaboration and management within an individual organization, not externally (although a feature called Extranet does exist to facilitate communication with partner organizations).
As a newcomer to a market where many organizations already have entrenched collaboration solutions in place, Bitrix24 faces a challenging road as it seeks to convince potential customers that its comprehensive approach to communication and management beats the individual dedicated platforms on which they already rely. But at a moment when migrating as much as possible to the cloud seems like the thing to do, Bitrix24’s entry into the channel is well-timed. We’ll keep our eyes on it in the months ahead.
