Venkat R Yeleti, the brain child behind enterprise social network, Peopledock talks to us about the product, future growth and more.
Recently, I had reviewed Peopledock, a social enterprise network which was neat, easy to use and had some very interesting features. However, the market for enterprise networks is not a new horizon and with the acquisition of Yammer by Microsoft, it has been more in discussion. India has also seen products like Kreeo, Emee, etc. that work in the same segment. So one must be wondering what is the USP of Peopledock. Venkat who spoke to me via email shares that Peopledock is designed and built to overcome the fundamental limitations of email. He further added that,
“The first thing you get when you get a job is an email id. And that’s probably the only communication tool most employees ever get. So they put it to all sorts of uses it wasn’t meant for – collaborating on a project for example. Email is good for one-to-one communication. But an office is all about people communicating in groups. If you want to communicate in groups you need Peopledock. Peopledock brings all the people in your office on to one platform and helps them communicate in ways that are not possible through email or any solution on the market today. The Peopledock UI makes it really frictionless to use and this has been our USP.”
Team of Peopledock
Definitely we tend to be comfortable in closed groups and office is no exception. But surprisingly enterprise network or social media at workplaces hasn’t seen a spark in India. Companies have kept a distance from such networks and one such reason is cultural change. One of the discussion topics last year during the NASSCOMPC was about this cultural change. But is the industry changing?
“We are essentially trying to solve a problem that most organizations do not realize they have and aren’t searching for. But that is changing. There are a few forward-thinking organizations (like Atos, see this Link) that have realized ‘the problem of email’ and are turning to solutions like Peopledock.” Adds Venkat.
Definitely Venkat, we need some early adopters and then we would see the entire herd following them. To give an example Venkat shared that 225 companies have registered on the Peopledock platform. But at the same time he doesn’t shy off in disclosing that,
“As high as the number may seem, we find most of them are dormant users who are still evaluating this new shift in office communications. The recent acquisition of Yammer by Microsoft has stirred up some interest in this space.“
Some things happen for good and hopefully this will get the industry to think about enterprise network which would eventually benefit the employees. Venkat who didn’t reveal the names of the companies that are using Peopledock because of their policy restrictions shared with me that at present Peopledock is free to try out. However, one would be charged a sum of $5/user/month if a company wants comprehensive admin controls.
Additionally, Peopledock has recently launched a group-chat module and plans to launch some interesting apps in the near future. The new group-chat feature allows you to share a file in a group-chat and it is automatically synced with the files-folder of all the participants of the group-chat.
Venkat believes that small features like this make Peopledock awesome. I am in concensus with Venkat and if you are looking for an enterprise network for your company then defntely you shouldn’t give Peopledock a miss.
Image Courtesy: Yourstory.in