Boston-based bigtincan today announced the launch of their bigtincan Hub, an enterprise content management and productivity solution that wants to be an alternative to Basecamp, Dropbox and the countless other enterprise productivity apps. The company is tackling the bring your own device (BYOD) trend, where workers are using their own mobile devices to access confidential company documents, emails and applications. Bigtincan Hub aims to give mobile workers a secure way to access company files from their phone or tablet.
The company originally launched in Australia in 2008 with several consumer-focused BlackBerry applications. Prior to the bigtincan Hub, the company released its BTC Dashboard, a product primarily focused on secure content management on mobile devices, with apps for iPhone and iPad. The company recently signed on 45 new clients, which include both SMBs and large Fortune 500 companies.
In addition to providing content access for mobile workers, the new Hub product aims to bring in productivity and a social layer. “We started to find out from customers that it’s great to push out content, but what they said to us was ‘we’d really like to have you guys help us with the productivity challenge and engage with with content so that when I get the content on my device I can actually do my job better,’” recently-appointed bigtincan COO Patrick Welch said in an interview.
The platform also features third-party integrations with a number of enterprise applications including SharePoint, Citrix, Outlook, SAP, and Salesforce, among others. Mobile workers can access content from their company’s servers both online and offline, and annotate, mark up, and edit documents including PDFs, Word Documents, PowerPoints, and spreadsheets which are saved and backed up to the client’s servers. It also has social features including a newsfeed to show all activity on any given project, and tools that help employees connect with each other. The platform is custom-priced based on the client.
“Our focus is to get the right content in the hands of the right people so they can do their job better. Most content management systems in organizations have failed because when they start loading a lot of content into the system it gets really unwieldy and difficult for the end-user to find the most relevant content. So mobile has given us a really good opportunity to do things differently, to say let’s build a system that gets smarter as we load more content,” Welch added.
According to Gartner, the enterprise application market is worth upwards of $120 billion as of 2012, so it’s no surprise that startups are looking to take advantage of recent trends in the market. Recently, BetaKit covered the launch of Openera, a document aggregation tool aimed at professionals. There are also a variety of document storage tools and enterprise collaboration platforms, from Dropbox, Box and Google Drive to Basecamp and Trello. However, with bigtincan’s previous success with their BTC Dashboard app, and now with the addition of their new social and productivity layers, the company will look to be an all-in-one enterprise solution to allow employers to keep up with their mobile workforce. Whether it can stand out in a crowded enterprise productivity space remains to be seen.