Skinny social business collaboration suite vs. siloed bloatware
This is a topic near and dear to my heart. This often gets debated as best of breed vs. product suite. Both camps have their views and opinions on why one is better over the other and, as with everything, the answer almost always is – it depends 
In our case, we believe in focused applications that work extremely well independently and provide a multiplicative effect when integrated.
While designing MangoApps one of the early decisions we made was to stay away from the traditional enterprise vendor model of picking a product silo and building the most obscure features in that silo. Instead we decided to provide a full set of well thought out, nicely integrated, real-time enterprise collaboration tools.
In other words, instead of differentiating on # of features, we chose to differentiate MangoApps based on its fundamentally different approach in seamlessly integrating new and existing collaboration paradigms, unified user experience, and open application architecture.
I recall it being a very short discussion with little disagreement among the team. There were multiple reasons why we moved away from the current enterprise vendor model. Instead of talking about the entire laundry list, I will just focus on one primary reason – we believe that most vertically focused enterprise software starts out with good intentions but quickly becomes bloated and morphs into something you can no longer manage or control.
To understand why this happens, let’s follow the money trail and ask ourselves how do vertically focused enterprise software vendors make money? Yupp – primarily through support contracts and by selling newer versions of the product they sold you before! What do you think these newer versions of the products do? They add features! When was the last time you heard a vendor come to you and said, “we would like to sell you a newer version of the software…however this version offers you less functionality then the last version does?” You get the picture. So, by its very nature, vertically focused software vendors (esp. in applications that are horizontal in nature) are stuck in a cycle that promotes nothing but bloated software. There are, of-course, exceptions to this – for example SalesForce. I admire SalesForce for trying to expand into a new product category through it’s Chatter offering and not continue to overbuild the SalesForce CRM system and turn it into another Siebel.
As part of our research, we looked around all the horizontally applicable products (from document management to idea management to performance management to real-time messaging systems) and didn’t find a single reason why these software offerings needed to be so complex, expensive and siloed. From the very beginning we didn’t want to be like most software companies that build anything and everything they can imagine in their products at the expense of simplicity and tightly integrated user experience.
We didn’t want our customer to have to spend months trying to install and setup the software, hire consultants to integrate the system, and hold on-going training sessions so employees could learn how to use it. We didn’t want to get stuck in the same vicious cycle most enterprise vendors find themselves in. So if that meant some folks will consider that we are not enterprise grade, we were OK with it.
We built MangoApps to provide the richness of Facebook while maintaining the simplicity of Twitter, and focused on integrating applications really-really well within the overall collaboration framework.
Our applications do all of what employees need to collaborate effectively and efficiently (they don’t however do all they want). We believe that providing a simple, seamless, integrated set of services provides for a multiplicative effect that no amount of features in so called “best of the breed” products can ever come close to (they call it best of breed..we take it to mean bloated, complex, overpriced, over promised and under delivered).
Having said that, we do recognize that there are instances where you need some of the horizontal tools we have built in MangoApps to provide for deeper functionalities (for e.g. using the MangoApps project management module you probably can’t build a nuclear bomb or an airplane, but it works just fine for most enterprise projects). For those cases, Engage enables easy enabling/disabling of built in modules, a full set of APIs, a plugin based integration model and comes with full source code so that our customers can integrate the specialized systems they may already have.
So, we welcome any applicable best of breed vs. MangoApps bake off and are confident that you will agree with us that the MangoApps approach is far superior to the bloated, segmented software approach enterprise vendors have been selling for decades.
