Facebook Plans to Shape Up Social Software for Work in 2016

Facebook Inc., after months of work and beta testing, will launch the business version of its social networking service in 2016. End Quote

(1888PressRelease) December 25, 2015 - Social networking has transformed how people interact, but it has barely made a dent in the way they work, particularly in large companies.

Social and collaboration tools from companies including Microsoft Corp.MSFT +0.85% and Salesforce.com Inc. have attempted to reshape the market, but adoption, according to market watcher IDC Corp., remains below expectations. Facebook is making a serious effort to change that.

"The fundamental idea behind Facebook at Work is that a more connected workplace is a more productive workplace," said Julien Codorniou, director of global platform partnerships for Facebook at Work.

Facebook's 1.55 billion active users globally give the company a head start. But key to success will be how Facebook integrates a wide array of enterprise software into its platform so employees can actually do their jobs without having to toggle out of Facebook at Work. Other enterprise social platforms have done this to an extent but analysts say they have not gone far enough. If the company's experience with Facebook at Work's pilot program is any indication, there's pent up demand. Royal Bank of Scotland sa RBS.LN +2.83% id it was one of about 60,000 companies that applied to participate. For the past six months, Facebook has been working with 300 companies including RBS, Club Med and Heineken NV to learn what they need and to refine the service.

In a sense, Facebook already knows the software works since employees have been using it internally for many years. It's been part of the company's secret to moving fast and scaling globally, said Mr. Codorniou. "When we feel that we have tested the product and our assumptions in as many industries and geographies as needed, we will be ready to launch," he added. Facebook will not give a more specific time frame than 2016 for the launch.

Employees using Facebook at Work connect with colleagues in much the same way as they link to friends. But while the enterprise service shares a similar look and feel, it is separate from the personal service and will not require people to have a personal account. Facebook also has built into the service enterprise-grade security and administration tools. RBS has committed to rolling out Facebook at Work more broadly.

Eight weeks ago RBS had about 500 of its 100,000 employees in the pilot, but today more than 5,000 participate. It plans to add over 30,000 to the service by the end of the first quarter of 2016 and 50,000 by mid-year, said Kevin Hanley, director of design at RBS. Mr. Hanley works closely with RBS CIO Patrick Eltridge who manages employee onboarding. The move is about more than technology. "There's a real potential to transform the way we work together and ultimately improve the service we provide to our customers," said Mr. Hanley.

The bank wants to drive a more transparent, collaborative and non-hierarchical culture through the tool itself. "It enables us to communicate and to discuss and to share and solve problems in ways that traditional tools such as email simply can't," he said. In some ways, Facebook's biggest competitor - like every other enterprise social network - is email. It's open, universal and corporations have been dependent upon it for decades. But Facebook says email promotes a hierarchical organization as opposed to an open and collaborative workplace.

"Email is an inherently top-down method of communication meant for broadcasting information as opposed to exchanging it," said Mr. Codorniou. Still, some analysts say it's too early to gauge impact. "It's a little hard to tell whether it's a game changer yet," said Brian Blau, research director of personal technologies at Gartner Inc.IT +1.05% Despite dozens of tools, there hasn't been an enterprise social software tool that has changed the status quo. Earlier this year research firm IDC downgraded its forecast for annual revenue growth in the worldwide enterprise social networks market. It now expects annual revenue to hit $3.5 billion by 2019, from $1.46 billion in 2014, growing about 19% per year over five years.

That's down from its forecast of 23% last year, and 42% in 2012. Facebook plans to attract companies with a software-as-a-service freemium model. Companies such as RBS are using the product for free. Companies that want more customer support, integrations with enterprise software or more analytics will pay a few dollars per month, per user, said Mr. Codorniou. Facebook's plan is to make it easy for employees to use its business service to get work done. That means integrating it with productivity tools and other enterprise software.

"We are already talking to all the software vendors that we can think to talk about our API strategy," he said. "For the users at Acme Corp. who have just purchased Facebook at Work, it needs to be part of the way they do customer service or the way the engineering team launches products," said Alan Lepofsky, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research.

One flaw of previous enterprise social networking tools is that they weren't integrated enough into the actual work employees do, he added. "Enterprise social networks must be part of the everyday workflow," said Nasi Jazayeri, executive vice president of Community Cloud at Salesforce.com Inc.CRM +0.23% The company integrates Salesforce Community Cloud and Chatter into its customer relationship management products. Customers can also embed Salesforce collaboration tools into third-party applications and integrate third-party components into the Salesforce platform, he said.

A Microsoft spokesperson said that Yammer is used by more than 500,000 organizations and is an integral part of Office 365. Slack, which plans to launch an enterprise offering early next year, has 150 apps available today, according to a spokesperson.

On December 15, Slack said it had established an $80 million fund to support its growing platform ecosystem. As Facebook at Work begins building its own enterprise ecosystem, the company wants to make its work tool as engaging as the consumer service. "I think that we have an edge with Facebook at Work because we'll give people tools that are as good as the ones they use in their personal lives," said Mr. Codorniou.

Source: wsj.com

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