Slack’s not bugging, Email’s going like cockroaches - Ryver’s Ready

Pratima H

SCOTTSDALE, USA: At the funeral of the much-beloved water-cooler, some came to pay their respects, some to see who all had come, some to strut their black wardrobes and some to genuinely cry a river over the demise of the ultimate office magnet.

But the mood abruptly turned from funereal to cheerful when the priest mentioned that the huddle-machine would soon be incarnated as something more fun, more tech-savvy and much easy to walk towards.

However, the storks won’t drop them near a cubicle or inside a corridor, warned some differently-attired people. The mourners turned their heads towards these future-gypsies. They had come out for some sun and air, after having been tucked inside mother ships like Slack, HipChat, Ryver etc. for long. They had something spooky and strong in their voices – and it was hard to shrug their alien fantasies off - there was an eerie ring of future somewhere.

And people did not have to wait too long. By the time, they lifted the coffin down and hurried back to their phones and desks, the world of water-cooler chats had indeed changed. In seven words -It had shrunk into a chat room.

The era of messaging tools had, Hallelujah, now Begun!

Teams started flocking towards these fun-virtual rooms and project workers gravitated towards their integrations, extensions, document insertions etc like moths to fire (only this time the fire warmed them instead of burning them).

Slack became as common an office routine as the backslap. Collaborations became hip with chat. No one had imagined that the consumer-world crayon-like messaging phenomenon could actually be replicated in the grey contours of the workplace.

But was this – is this- whirlwind rebirth-day party to last?

Because sooner or later, whether users like or not; the cynics, the sceptics and the IT janitors would jump in too. A dartboard would be hauled inside to replace the spinning bottle and the game would change the mood of the office soiree for sure. Grunts notwithstanding, question marks would fly like merciless arrows and hit some vulnerable veins – safety, shadow IT, scale, pricing, organisation’s borders, stability, commitment , work-side distractions, time-wastage holes, the irony of productivity loss and everything that runs along.

When we get a chance to ‘chat’ with Pat Sullivan, CEO of Ryver, a player to reckon with and fighting pound-to-pound with names like Slack in team communication rings; we furnish him with these rough and ruthless darts.

It’s a jolt then to be accosted with similarly sharp javelins in response. Can emails really be the tech version of cockroaches? Can free and unlimited usage really take on Slack? Can Slack stop being a rival to Ryver? Can noise be the unexpected but an actual challenge that this space would have to spar with? Can features like Task manager, cross-boundary exchange and integrations turn into the next big thing for these fancy tools?

Ryver’s Pat has some fascinating thoughts on all these rocky cliffs. So let’s dive in?

Was there really a gap staring at all those office suites, software-makers, emails or the PBX machines? What has made messaging tools so ‘about time’?

I believe that in a way, a new category of software has started. To a great degree, Slack; to some degree, HipChat and Ryver too have uncovered a great problem that was lurking unnoticed so far. The next few years would bring in more radical changes in the way people communicate.

Email, let’s face it, had got so challenging and unwieldy to use that it was making office communication difficult. At least when the most important part of the communication is buried deep along less or not-important communication; we know well that a team can only move as fast as the collaboration tool it uses.

Interestingly enough, email was never designed to be a collaboration tool. When it comes to collaboration it’s about speed between partners, vendors, team members, marketing guys – everyone. So what Ryver and other players have done is pulled the workers out of endless email pits and enabled them with the one thing that makes the difference between fast and slow decisions- speed.

So email made things easy for messaging apps? Would it be so easy to elbow it out?

If you look at the problem from a new angle, you would be amazed that it wouldn’t matter in case of such tools if some user was even an idiot. They are so easy and fun and have radically changed everything. We are in the early adoption phase of a new category. Ten years from now, it would not occur to anyone in business that there used to be something called email. No, email won’t be completely displaced. They would be around, like cockroaches of the Internet world. But their relevance would become less and less.

Email was never supposed to be a collaboration tool: Pat Sullivan, Ryver

Why shouldn’t this worry the IT folks on aspects like security, versioning, document management etc? Isn’t this another Shadow IT beast in the making?

Look at it this way. We integrated with stuff like DropBox or Google Drive, SharePoint etc. So document management and control continues to be handled well. A use can readily pull links to any document inside the messaging. Right now we are just integrating one way and not trying to get into versioning etc.

Security-wise, everything is encrypted. Users are specifically invited by members of a team and that controls access strongly.

Coming to the oft-made comparisons with Slack, where would you say Ryver stacks up better?

Slack does have an 18-month head-start over us and each of us has something that the other one does not have. We have chat and post, instead of just chat. This allows a threaded, topic-based discussion – much like Yammer. That’s a feature that people like a lot. Then, we are 100 per cent free and do not charge eight to 15 dollars per user like others do. We make money on other areas and not charge the user for basic features.

Exactly! If you offer the free platter, what’s your monetization model after all?

It’s with new ingredients like the Task Manager where we enable seamless integration of tasks. People who need it will pay for it. People who don’t need it, won’t. We also have other applications in progress for the money part. But we are clear that we will never charge for features. We would charge for additional applications. Why should we charge users for sign-ons for compliance etc? Not everyone in an organization will need tasks; some would just need a place to chat. We won’t charge that genre of users.

Why is ‘free’ such a strong proposition for Ryver?

I am going to use a differentiator that competitors do not have. I am going to give free what Slack charges for. Free has a different connotation and relevance, if you think about it. Many people deem email to be a free option. If you want people to switch from email to something else, that ‘something’ has to be free. Why would someone pay if s/he wants to add five new people on a messaging room? For that, this person would need permission from the centralized admin. This person might as well give it up and say – “What the heck, I will just use email.”

At Ryver, we do away with the need of permissions to create a team. The admin nod is an old-world view of the money part. When users see free, they are free and the team communication is more spread-able.

How about other players in competition? It has been surmised that Fleep stands out for non-platform-chat-messages that can surpass a team’s walled garden or go into a non-user’s email. Or that Jostle allows going across organizational boundaries to other partners, stakeholders. Or HipChat’s strengths on on-premise server alternatives. How unique are these differences?

Those are all the kind of things we would be adding in due course of time. On-premise, for example, is not happening now. Lot of traction suggests people leaning towards cloud. We can give Amazon server options but am not sure how crucial on-premise is as of now. We are undecided on that yet. But everything can come to email and be replied back to from email for many use instances. Now that’s a feature that casual or occasional users might prefer. But eventually, if someone starts getting too many emails from a Ryver space, the user might opt for direct replies instead of emails.

So who is Ryver pitted against – Slack, HipChat, Email or something else?

Currently we are competing with Slack, HipChat and others in this space. We are working on and adding a Task Manager and hope to release it in the fourth quarter. Post that the head-to-head game would be gone. Then we would be in the same space as an Asana or a Trello. So yes, over the time, Ryver’s competition will change.

You do have a Slack import feature now?

Yes, it’s for both Slack and HipChat and allows people to work free and seamless. They like the ease of switching from one place to another.

What if someone said that all you players and this success is just an inconsequential blip on the radar? Anything that concerns you about how this space would shape up in the next few years?

I am not particularly concerned about next four to five years because additional functions and features will make things only easier. We are in a good position now and will be there. Of course, one wonders if someone like Google or Facebook builds something as good as a suite or something. But even then there will always be some ground to compete on. I hope we are the ones causing concerns for others and not the other way round (chuckles).

As to whether this trend will last or not, its main strength is speed and how it accelerates an organization. Email has failed and nothing is going to change that. Its problems will only get worse.

Would the ‘noise’ problem (constant notifications, distractions) about messaging flavor be a serious one? Would it make workers save time or waste time instead?

It is a problem, I aver. Many reports have started popping about how people have stopped using a competitor’s app and once developers figure out the features of fun, most people end up wasting time. We, at Ryver, are putting a lot of focus in addressing this issue – like the ability to filter notifications and get beeped by only a chosen few people and teams. One can still go there occasionally but the ability to control constant alerts is a big feature.

Signal vs. Noise is a big issue in this space. It’s easy for certain people to be pulled into a joke or something fun and shift away from work. So we are putting in a lot of time to retain the engagement and fun aspect without sacrificing actual work and without letting ‘noise’ take over.

What lies ahead? Is Asia interesting?

I am actually surprised to discover how people in countries across Asia, Europe, Mexico etc are adopting fast despite the absence of a non-English version yet and presence of servers only in the US as of now. It’s good to see that the way we have developed Ryver is paying off and it’s catching up and there is no latency when people sync up across oceans. Technology has made communication instantaneous and breezy.