Durba Ghosh Moneycontrol News
Team communication platform Flock is tuning up its ante against its global competitors. After launching an open source Flock platform for developers to take on market leader Slack, the startup is soon to launch a Slack migration feature, taking the battle right on its rival’s turf.
Started in 2014 as a messaging tool, Flock pivoted to focus on enterprise messaging in 2015. But Flock is not alone. Numerous Slack contenders have already thrown their weight to compete with the US-based company, trying to grab market share in a USD 26 billion industry.
Directi founder Bhavin Turakhia, who is also the founder and CEO of Flock has invested an estimated USD 45 million in his own startup.
Shanghai-based Teambition, in particular, seeks to combine the project management and file sharing services of Slack, Trello, Flowdock, and Dropbox.
As per estimates, the global enterprise communication and collaboration segment is expected to surpass USD 49 billion mark by 2021.
The company has a huge gap to fill if it wants to reach anywhere near Slack in terms of users. It has just about 50,000 users compared to Slack’s 5 million users.
“The new Slack migration feature is very intuitive. It imports all chat history, project history, messages, and so on (from Slack). So there is no data mismatch,” Ninad Raval, VP for product and design at Flock told Moneycontrol.
The company plans to expand its team of 150, and to explore more international markets beyond Brazil, the US, the UK, Russia, and Spain.
Flock also wins in terms of cost. To start, Flock is free for all users, with no restrictions on features. It only charges the users who want to access chat or data history beyond 10,000, which costs USD 3 per person per month. In comparison, Slack is free till 5GB usage, post which it charges USD 6.67 per active user per month, plus a USD 8 monthly fee that provides 10GB file storage for every team member.
Flock is now working on creating a similar migration tool for HipChat, which is another Slack competitor. The startup which opened up its platform for developers to create chat apps independently, also plans to white-label the product for some companies. Flock has its product and development team based in India.
The platform has enterprise users such as Whirlpool, Voonik, Ricoh, Victorinox, Yepme, Voonik, 1mg, Arihant Capital, Meru Cabs, CouponDunia, Mothercare, and VMWare.
The aim now, Ninad says, is to evolve into a full stack business collaboration platform in order to differentiate.
durba.ghosh@nw18.com
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