Disclaimer: This interview is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. In Practise is an independent publisher and all opinions expressed by guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of In Practise.

{audio:0:02:54} I know you're a few years removed from Beezy, but obviously you've got a ton of experience in the Microsoft world, so looking forward to chatting. I have a few different areas where I spend a lot of time and one of them is Microsoft ecosystem players. For every dollar of Microsoft sales, you have $9 of ecosystem revenue, and there's a tendency in the public space to focus on how great that $1 of Microsoft is, but there are many great businesses which are much smaller and benefit from that $9. 

I am trying to understand how people use intranets and custom coding them internally, versus using a LiveTiles or an intranet out of the box type of product like Beezy.

I am trying to get my arms around how sticky these deployments were, what it even involved to go through an RFP and what a 1,000-employee business versus a 300,000-employee business might be looking for. LiveTiles has been an amalgamation of five or six businesses which have been acquired over time, and with that background which is true for anybody in that $9 space, I want to understand how you do the tango with Microsoft. The modern version of SharePoint was much better than previous versions, at least from a visual standpoint, so I would like to figure out how that impacted the intranet players.

I am happy to start anywhere but would love to hear about your experience. Most of my questions are around how an investor in LiveTiles should think about this space. What do you think about the role of intranet and how do you see that going forward in this landscape of hybrid work? Is it right to think that is more relevant than before? If there is anything from the Beezy days which comes to mind as you think about the competitive landscape? I would love to go there as well.

{audio:0:08:30} I have been in tech my entire career, for 30 years. I got involved building an intranet when I was working for Pacific Telesis, a shared services organization. It was originally named Pacific Telesis Shared Services and simply went by PTSS. That was my first introduction into acronyms and how important they are. We built out a portal from scratch, automating some of the workflows and common activities of project management organizations. I ended up consulting on the side for several companies. I also created a startup during business school at the end of the 90s and, after three and a half years of working nights and weekends with several buddies, sold that to Rational Software right before they got acquired by IBM and made the transition from building collaboration centric project management solutions to portfolio management.

{audio:0:09:48} In 2004, I wrote a white paper doing a deep dive into Microsoft SharePoint and what they needed to go and do, the early version of the technology. I saw some good things about it but there were also some huge gaps. I was invited to their campus by members of the product team who showed me what they were working on, which would eventually become SPS 2007. This was in August 2004 and I told them they were selling garbage and that they had no idea what real collaboration was. A year later, I was consulting for a Utah company doing $800 million in revenue. I had moved to Seattle but was consulting in Salt Lake, flying out Monday morning and home on Friday night, which was fantastic.

{audio:0:11:06} I did that for a year but this company insisted on working with Project Server which was a struggle. They wanted to deploy SharePoint globally and I tried to talk them into something more expensive but functional, but they chose to do the SharePoint thing. In March of 2006, I caught the bug and went to work for Microsoft for a team called Microsoft Managed Services, or MMS. It got renamed as BPOS, Business Productivity Online Services, which then became Office 365. I was a product manager for a company which went public but is now private again, called E2open, and was the project manager hired to build their collaboration manager platform.

{audio:0:12:08} We built a dedicated hosted secure collaboration platform which we launched the first version built on a code base of Matrix 1 which we had acquired. It was very robust and secure, and deployed it for two years, at companies like Hitachi and Matsushita in the Philippines and Japan, as well as Seagate and Nortel. When I joined Microsoft, I was the only one who had built what we talked about doing with Office 365. I was frustrated because my primary complaint was the old sales model. SharePoint or WSS was the free version everybody was installing and they were loading it into enterprise agreements and were surprised that, by the end of those EAs, people were not renewing, catching the vision or buying into this thing.

{audio:0:13:40} The reason I share my frustration was that, at the time, Microsoft didn't care whether people were using it or achieving business outcomes with it. Fast forward to today and that is the number one metric around that. Microsoft are obsessed with whether people are adopting and are they engaged. Viva is all about the next level of that. They are seeing increased numbers but will they experience burn out, how is it fitting in and what is the actual culture? What should we be thinking about the numbers that we are seeing?

{audio:0:14:39} With all that, back to your broader question around the role of intranet. There was a leap ahead with SharePoint 2010, kind of a mainstreaming of SharePoint and a focus on employee experience. Whatever flavor it is, an intranet or SharePoint or Teams or Yammer, the concept is around a centralized place where people go and work. That is much more dynamic and flexible and introduces the bring your own tool kind of concept. You might have an enterprise spread out geographically, with different technologies being embraced in different areas. You try to bring those things together, the concepts of the intranet and the single pane of glass in which you look at all the pieces. All those things are even more important now, especially in a hybrid space.

{audio:0:16:13} I left Microsoft in 2009 and went to a little SharePoint migration ISV called echoTechnology. 10 months later, they were acquired by Axceler and three and a half years after that, they were acquired by Metalogix. A year after that I left, and then they were acquired by Quest. I started consulting on the side and joined Beezy for almost two years. I consulted for another six months after I left, but I loved their interface and their head of product is fantastic. I didn't care for some of the other leaders at the company and left because of the leadership, not the technology. Although Beezy doesn't think of themselves in the intranet in a box space, they are.

{audio:0:17:28} They also tell people they're a packaged solution, but out of all of the intranet in a box vendors, none are what people think they are.

{audio:0:17:41} Explain what you mean by that. Is there no such thing as turn key because coding and deployment are always required?

{audio:0:17:50} And that is not only once but continuous?

{audio:0:17:55} Yes, it's a fallacy out there. The big players are Valo and Powell 365; Beezy are not even in the top 10, size wise. They were acquired by an industry who fit them into event management. Their UI is fantastic but I struggled while I was there. You might be familiar with Orchestry. Michal Pisarek is the CEO and founder and had an intranet in a box solution, one of the best-looking products out there. His was probably the closest to being an actual product, and he sold that to Perficient or NSI and no one has heard from it since. I have had many conversations with players in that space who talk about what a deployment looks like around their solutions and where you are then tied in. That was the struggle at Microsoft where it took all of their product teams, and why people were frustrated with the moves Microsoft made. They wanted it to be a product or service you could sign up with a credit card and start using, but to make it truly turn key, you needed the blandest vanilla product in the world.

{audio:0:20:02} It has improved and many organizations decided to brand it and personalize but the majority of companies don't realize they do not need to have all those things. They could utilize 70% of the functionality a Beezy or Valo would provide, and get that out of the box with Office 365 and forego the other components. After Jeff Teper stepped away from the role then took back over SharePoint, he met with a handful of MVPs. He wanted my thoughts and I had lunch with him in Seattle. They were working on a new version; it was the May 4th event in San Francisco. It was Teper coming back in and sharing where things were going.

{audio:0:21:29} SharePoint 2010 was another turning point and they kept using the word beautiful, the new modern interface. I asked him what he thought the future for intranet in a box providers would be. He said that he couldn't see any of them around within two years, that they would all be gone. I interviewed him for my podcast two years later at an event in Minneapolis where I reminded him of that conversation, and that there was now 5X the number of intranet in a box providers out there. What is that company in London who does the report on it?

{audio:0:22:51} Yes ClearBox; they do a great job.

{audio:0:22:55} I have been quoted in past versions of that, and I asked Sam Marshall how many vendors they were actively tracking and at the time, this was two years ago, it was 89. I asked Teper about that and he admitted he was surprised how they were all thriving. It was still all good for him because Microsoft's business had continued to grow. The number of net new installs of SharePoint are still going up. Yammer is surpassing other products and I have theories around that which I have shared with Microsoft who agree with me. The reason Yammer has taken off is that they finally did the integrations they spoke of seven years ago. They shifted direction integrating deeper with Outlook and Teams to help organizations understand how these pieces work together. My company, AvePoint, use a formal intranet built on SharePoint Online. I live and breathe inside Teams and Yammer daily. You go to our intranet and do searches within each of the silos, but search remains an elusive dream state. We do not have a truly federated integrated search yet, and Microsoft still have five search locations. That goes back to the old Microsoft battling business units, who cannot come together on a unified search strategy.

{audio:0:25:35} This is super helpful. Can we go back to your days at Beezy? I have watched LiveTiles over time and have seen the value prop of their product change. I used to think about it as if you want a really nice looking SharePoint intranet, you could either hire a bunch of developers, which would be expensive and you would have to maintain that, or you could opt for a drag and drop type product, which is what has evolved with Modern. People realized you don't need a customized look, and although Modern fixed some things, it remains a horrible tool for internal communications.


{audio:0:26:59} That is a number one selling point for Beezy. There are other nuanced propositions for Valo and other players, but Beezy bought into the social construct. Their interface with the dynamic cards and the research they've done to understand the search experience and more importantly the discovery experience, is where the Modern intranet fails and where Beezy got it right. The reason why the interfaces for LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook look so similar is because they work. We may not be fans of ad-driven things but if you remove the ads and think, in context, of how the content is served up, and get past the evils of the duopoly and the politics behind the algorithms with the players, there is no place for that within the enterprise.

{audio:0:28:28} To login as a user and have the system feed me information based on the projects and products I am actively participating in, and offer the news which is relevant to my profile, looking at the level of interaction learning from that, is what is important. Serving up those things while prioritizing it in that card fashion, whether you're touch screen moving through that interface and looking at what rises to the top. I am drawn towards and love and miss having that interface. Beezy was directly competing with SharePoint Modern but it depends which features are important to you. I would say give me that front end interface in SharePoint and Teams and the back end and Yammer. I don't care about the rest of what Beezy was doing.

{audio:0:29:45} They launched Beezy Pages two years ago but delayed the launch at the end of 2015. It took them another five years to release that new feature that was already too late with SharePoint. SharePoint Modern Pages had already been out for a while, and Beezy would have been so far ahead of things but they still have that interface. The share card concept exists nowhere else and is brilliant in its simplicity and design. Maximo who was their design lead but is now their chief product officer, is a brilliant man and a nice human being. He was one of my favorites.

{audio:0:31:56} Maximo Castagno. He is awesome.

{audio:0:32:00} I am surprised by LiveTiles, which is an amalgamation of several businesses, $65 million ARR and claims to be the largest in terms of deployment.

{audio:0:32:19} Yes, but what does that mean for LiveTiles? I have limited interaction with LiveTiles but I know several AvePoint people who are former LiveTiles. Damian in Australia was their Biz Dev channel person. I know them because of their acquisition of Hyperfish and those folks, but all the key people left with the acquisition.

{audio:0:32:42} Hyperfish is a small one which was more about Active Directory.

{audio:0:32:55} But I have never run into anybody who have actually deployed.

{audio:0:33:01} Wizdom Intranet effectively became one of their main products and is heavy in the DACH region, Germany, Switzerland and Europe, but are small in the US. Historically, they have been much more of an overseas product, but they do have Nestlé as a customer.

{audio:0:34:04} Do you know of any European companies, even outside the Microsoft ecosystem, who have succeeded well in the Americas? There are many stories of the opposite direction, but I see that they struggle because the sales and marketing is so different.

{audio:0:34:27} Yes, they have struggled with that and the CEO tried to establish a presence in New York for three years to figure it out, but he went back to Australia, so I don't know if it worked out. Part of my job is figuring out if it even matters having the US, as long as you think the product is good. Wizdom acquired a good product and it seems the biggest value prop they're pointing to now, which is becoming a little bit of a fad, is front line workers. They are saying yes, you might have Modern, but with LiveTiles you could have your intranet for everyone who doesn't have an Office 365 license. Nestlé desk workers have access to an intranet but nobody at the plant does because they're not at a desk and don't have licenses. The Wizdom platform goes across mobile and desktop and can integrate with the typical SharePoint Intranet, so you can have both.

{audio:0:36:09} There are two areas where the intranet in a box solution providers have strength. Microsoft took the design aspect away; there are still elements of that but no longer as strong. Microsoft remains a very expensive convoluted proposition of what they need to have; they over sell and over price. The other area Microsoft is failing at is the extranet story, where many vendors have stronger value propositions. The danger is that Microsoft will eventually figure out the front line and external user scenarios; they are currently working hard on both. They are close to taking that away as well but all the companies have benefited from more of a market positioning of focusing more on a 50-person organization, which could still have the complexity to require a formal intranet.

{audio:0:37:44} The size of the pie has increased but Microsoft will be the biggest over time and will take more of that pie. My first project, that Teper co-funded with a dozen other Microsoft partners, was research into SharePoint and the life of on-prem. If you go to my blog, you can find a report and a bunch of analysis that came out of that. It's up on the top at buckleyplanet.com; you go up in the resources and scroll down, and you will see the SharePoint on-prem and hybrid. This area also took Microsoft and Teper by surprise. I had a conversation with Jared Spataro when I was with Axceler, who ate his words in Houston in the second meeting where he recognized that moving to the cloud would take longer.

{audio:0:39:28} It took Microsoft by surprise to where they were talking about shutting down SharePoint on-prem, but it wasn't officially out there and no one was authorized to say anything about that. The rumor got out and there was such a tongue lashing at Microsoft, they went back and course corrected, where now there is no plan to stop making an on-prem version. They don't have a sunset date and there is nothing in the planning because the numbers justify continuing to make an on-prem version every four years. That tells you about the strength of the category and the various providers out there.

{audio:0:40:27} To your question about Microsoft dependent business, as the size of the pie is increasing, the slices gets denser within that. AvePoint is a great example, but obviously I cannot get into specifics. This is public; we just had our 14th consecutive growth quarter. I don't concern myself with that as I am more at the product and strategy level. I care more about the technology. This is where my frustration at Axceler and Metalogix was; I was pushing saying multi-tenant and multi-cloud but no one was listening, back when I was one of AvePoint's most hated competitors when they started investing in the cloud. They even spoke about multi cloud capabilities. It's a simple idea and many companies are focused this way. All the things we do for the Microsoft ecosystem, we also do for other cloud environments and set up policies and insights across those clouds, for those who want to put policy and compliance rules in place and for them to be acted upon across all systems in which they have workflows.

{audio:0:42:33} That is where the future is and Microsoft have recognized that. When Sajith came on board and spoke at the partner conference in Las Vegas, I was in the reporter's space sitting with the ZDNet folks, Mary Jo Foley, Paul Thurrott and others. We were having a conversation about what Sajith was talking about. To paraphrase, he said they were going to build the best technology out there and where they don't have the best or any solutions, they will partner, integrate and connect. He went on to talk about needing to look at customers from end to end and what their customers were trying to accomplish. The customer cares about the end to end experience and Microsoft need to support them in that view. They may work with direct competitors in some of those spaces to ensure their components work well with everything else in that end to end customer experience.

{audio:0:44:05} We talked about it that whole week and I have gone back to that point and paraphrased it. We are now seeing Microsoft's participation in their open data initiative, but it's not getting as much press because it is no longer sexy. Talking with people at Adobe and SAP about some of the marketing automation solutions and with the Dynamics folks with the Power Platform, all supports those earlier statements about people coming from different backgrounds. We need to be able to pull data from their silos and enable communication between those different tools and systems. Looking back down at Modern work collaboration, the world that I live in, all that is relevant. That's where it's going.

{audio:0:45:17} That makes a ton of sense. The intranet in a box providers and Microsoft are inevitably encroaching on that space, but one thing which was always perceived about channel partners like Rhipe, Crayon or SoftwareONE, was people worrying about how to continue making money with Microsoft as your partner. That is a question that LiveTiles always gets. Microsoft wants their product gone, but they believe Microsoft view them and the other intranet providers as partners who are good for them. What would be your gut take on that?

{audio:0:46:44} At the end of the day, in tech, it doesn't matter how friendly you are, if Microsoft views what you're doing, that they're not doing today, as helping sell net new licenses, they will come after you. There are certain areas Microsoft look at, but you have to look at the announcements Microsoft make and weigh that against their ability to execute on them. I have been in the Microsoft ecosystem since 2005 formally, and have learned enough that when they announce something, what to look for, what to ask about or how real is this thing?

{audio:0:47:45} Viva today is more like the intranet in a box, more of a deployment project, not a product. It is a philosophy for organizing your intranet and focusing on the health and well-being of your employees. Syntex and Viva Topics are more of a product. They are half product and half information architecture methodology. Microsoft's marketing always outpaces reality. Sometimes they say something and they actually have it and are trying to get better at that. Being part of TAP, MVP and RD, there are weekly MVP NDA calls, and with as much insight as we have into everything Microsoft are doing, there are still always surprises. Some tiny subset of a private beta with a handful of MVPs who are unembargoed in that they can now breathe and talk about the things they were involved in.

{audio:0:49:33} As a partner, we have been in some of those double pinky swear secret groups, of insights into what they are doing. Microsoft spreads that around but they do have their favorites. If you ever want to know what's happening around information architecture or specifically in the compliance space, pick Joanne Klein's brain. She is the MVP who is their current favorite child. She is also one of my favorite people because she knows her stuff in that space.

{audio:0:50:10} Having said this, even though we partner very closely, we hold Microsoft at arm's length, as does every ISM I have worked for, echo, Axceler, Metalogix, Beezy and dozens of other ISV customers. I am an adviser for tyGraph, I am now at AvePoint, but all of my other clients have all held Microsoft at an arm's length and are careful around it. As a result, the field has out-innovated Microsoft, no matter what they come up with. To your question about how long those gaps were, Microsoft is good at closing gaps, but when they do, they also open new gaps every time. That is why you need to stay on top of things. The people who rail against the advances in technology and disappearing jobs because of AI, that is creating 5X the number of jobs and opportunities. Every move Microsoft make, they might close a gap, but they cause a tectonic shift elsewhere and break apart new ground.

{audio:0:51:26} Yes, that makes sense to me.

{audio:0:51:35} I am a purist and, fundamentally, a collaboration technology guy. I was scheduled to start a doctoral program looking specifically at studying collaboration technology more on the sociology side of it and the impacts on teams. So I am excited to see the direction, interest in and growth in this category, but I wish I had pursued my PhD 20 years ago. That would have been seven years of my life. Microsoft is taking a bigger chunk of that pie so solution providers have to then think, are they a SharePoint ISV or a collaboration ISV?

{audio:0:52:47} Or employee experience ISV?

{audio:0:52:49} Employee experience, yes, and then doing that, going where the customers are. AvePoint's have strength with some of the competitors coming in from the Google space, and I would argue that the Microsoft ecosystem is, end level, more complex. There is so much more depth and breadth in the collaboration space within the Microsoft ecosystem than there is anywhere else, certainly within the Google Workspace world.

{audio:0:53:28} This is certainly not my view but some people believe SharePoint is less relevant than ever because of Teams, which will become the new SharePoint, which doesn't make sense but how would you respond to that?

{audio:0:54:02} SharePoint has a different story and pitch for it and there are still organizations who are building out SharePoint intranets. For the past decade, eight of the 10 top intranets who have won the internet design awards were all built on SharePoint. It remains the leading platform out there. There are several organizations who say they don't need an intranet and will build out in Teams. Would a one to 500 person organization build a formal intranet? Probably not, because they could get most of what they need in Teams. However, even though smaller organizations are sitting on top of teams, SharePoint is there because the Teams architecture is SharePoint and Exchange.

{audio:0:55:18} That was the biggest complaint; people say they don't want that SharePoint thing, look at this beautiful intranet, we want that, but that is SharePoint. People suffered from those who didn't know what they were doing, building something out and many times trying to force fit a .net dev exercise, rather than utilize out of the box features. That was part of the strong early on messaging with Office 365. Don't break it, rather utilize what's there and then follow the framework to extend it.

{audio:0:56:04} Initially that framework to extend it was limited but it has expanded immensely. I would argue if there's anything you think it cannot do in a supportable, manageable, scalable way inside the SharePoint framework, go to one of the P&P sessions or look at the past recordings. You will find the solution out there, and it will be supportable and extendable. Will Microsoft keep up with the direction of all the pieces they are going? That is why they extended Viva. I am a big fan of ally.io which goes back to my PMO PMP roots of focusing on the objectives and KPI side of it; integrating that has been a missing piece from the Viva story.

{audio:0:57:18} I am excited they are going in that direction but there will be other components of Viva. Between Viva and Loop and the packaging of the Fluid framework, that will change how many of these products interact and work. That is another area where intranet providers could start leveraging these components. The APIs aren't there yet to do that, but they could start by building other advanced capabilities using Fluid which may outpace what Microsoft does within their own platform. New technology will somewhat disrupt, but there are brand new opportunities which will open up for growth.

{audio:0:58:17} Last point on Mesh, I think Mesh is simply a waste of time.

{audio:0:58:24} This has been super helpful. As an investor who is interested in this space, what would be the things to look for in the intranet in a box space?

{audio:0:59:04} Doing a deep dive into the Loop space. If you want to get some insights into that and how disruptive it really is, someone to follow is Darryl Webster out of Auckland, who just started the first Microsoft Loop online user group and is creating a ton of content. He is a good friend and fellow MVP and a very smart guy. He is all over this and would be great to talk to. If you're interested in talking to him and want an introduction, I am happy to connect you two.

{audio:0:59:50} As far as opportunities go, there is a current gap for the intranet in a box providers to go vertical. Beezy was sold because it was a vertical play looking at a specific solution. Other players could build something deeply integrated into financial services, healthcare or manufacturing. I have a good friend who is an MVP based out of Perth, who is focusing 100% on oil and gas, not because he lives in Perth. He had clients all over the world but gave them up and is going deep on specific solutions for oil and gas and is expanding. That is where I think a lot of the opportunity is, instead of only looking at growing the Microsoft ecosystem while also fending off what they are doing. It will be about going deep within an industry.

{audio:1:01:25} That is super helpful and makes a lot of sense. I appreciate your insights and thanks for spending the time with me.


LiveTiles & The Microsoft Sharepoint Ecosystem

Microsoft GTM Director at AvePoint and former CMO at Beezy

inpractise.com/articles/livetiles-and-the-microsoft-sharepoint-ecosystem

LiveTiles & The Microsoft Sharepoint Ecosystem(December 9, 2021)

Microsoft GTM Director at AvePoint and former CMO at Beezy

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