The London-based company, which provides a range of online collaboration tools and services, announced on Thursday that it had closed a series C round from investors including Jafco, DAG, Matrix and Eden. In addition, Subrah Iyar, the founder of WebEx, is participating in the round, along with Herb Madan (RouteScience).

The money will take the total the company has raised to $40 million, and comes ahead of what Mitchell told me was a concerted effort to expand with the demands of business customers.

“The headline stats are that our business has been tripling in size each year, and we’re expecting to more than triple this year,” he told me. “But the reason we’ve taken this funding now — because we didn’t need it — is because our enterprise customers, our big customers, grew fivefold last year and they’re on course to grow eightfold this year. Those are pretty extraordinary levels of growth.”

Huddle’s customer profile has altered over the last few years, moving from small businesses to a range of huge clients including both the U.K. and U.S. governments, as well as large corporations such as Diageo and HTC. That trend, said Mitchell, was now playing out in a serious way as top level executives started to invest in cloud services for their companies.

“Up until two or three years ago, the cloud has been growing with pockets of use and early adopters,” he said. “In the last 6 months, the CIO community has suddenly woken up and said that cloud, collaboration and content are three of the biggest problems they need to solve. We’ve now got to the point where, for example, we took a call the other day from an organization that said ‘we’ve got 2,000 users — can we scale up to 85,000?’”

Huddle already expanded its offering for large companies earlier this year, but it has also been expanding its product line with efforts like Huddle Sync, which not only allows users to carry and edit files across all sorts of hardware platforms and devices — but also knows what documents you should be working on before you do.

It plans to use the money to expand, particular in the U.S., where the company has just opened up a new office in New York. While the round is large for a series C, it is substantially less than one of its main rivals, Box.com, which pulled in a blockbuster $81 million round last winter. And then, of course, there’s always Microsoft’s SharePoint, which has a dominant role in this sector.

“The content collaboration space is about $25 billion in annual turnover,” said Mitchell. “But if you added up all of the social guys, all of the cloud storage guys, that probably comes to 5 percent of the market in their current form. Ninety five percent of the market is in the big, old boys — so we’re going for the 95 percent. SharePoint accounts for $10 billion of the $25 billion, nearly half of the market.”

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Below are five important trends in collaboration solutions. Think carefully about how the solution you are using (or considering) reflects this rapidly changing dynamic.

1. Collaboration equals integration

Collaboration means many things to many people. For some, it’s document management and sharing. For others, it’s social networking (within a business context). And for others still, it’s project or task management for teams. However it is defined, effective collaboration solutions will increasingly combine the elements of project and work planning, file sharing and social task management into one unified whole.

The pendulum is swinging from point tools to integrated collaboration solutions. We all know that breaking down silos in organizations is key to ensuring effective collaboration. Similarly, the tools that those teams use must also break through artificial barriers between domains of collaboration. Approaches to breaking these barriers range from the numerous, external integrations of Tibco Tibbr to our all-in-one system, Mindjet Connect. Either approach is equally valid and worthy of consideration.

2. Integration does not equal complication

The trend towards integration may seem to imply increased complexity, but the most successful solutions will prevent that from happening. The war in this space is not being won by complex features; it is being won by usability. Because a satisfying user experience is paramount to driving user adoption — and a collaboration tool is worth nothing if the team members won’t actually use it on a daily basis — people will move towards collaboration solutions that are simple to use and immediately gratifying. Do.com is a good example of a simple-to-use collaboration tool that combines usability with capability.

3. Public and private co-exist

While the dramatic push to cloud-based collaboration continues, on-premise collaboration products still maintain an important role for enterprises not yet ready to make the transition. Even organizations that require some of their content to be stored — and for collaboration to take place — behind the firewall still require the ability to collaborate seamlessly with external parties in the form of the three ‘C’s: contractors, consultants and clients. As a result, many organizations that have not fully embraced public cloud-based collaboration solutions will still require a combination of on-premise and public cloud solutions to meet their needs.

This is often seen in the case of organizations that are using Microsoft SharePoint, which includes the majority of large enterprises today. Although SharePoint has been a strong tool for document storage, sharing and basic task management behind the firewall, external collaboration has never been its strong point. Now many organizations are beginning to supplement SharePoint with other tools to break through that barrier and generally improve the usability of SharePoint. Solutions that play particularly well with SharePoint include Box and my own company. Box’s SharePoint integration provides users with access to files in SharePoint. And Mindjet has a version of Connect that runs entirely on-premise on top of SharePoint.

4. Collaboration mobilization

Like everything else in the world of technology, collaboration is going mobile. Recently, the daily time spent in mobile apps surpassed desktop and mobile web consumption. Driven primarily by the remarkable popularity of iOS and Android platforms, it took less than three years for native mobile apps to achieve this level of usage.

The majority of web-based collaboration platforms today have a mobile component. Huddle, Asana and Mindjet  all have natively-written mobile applications for various platforms that largely function as add-ons to their core platforms. As mobile technologies continue to mature, the focus of these applications will shift from being second-tier clients of cloud-based applications to being the main point of interaction between users and the collaboration services. For many knowledge workers, mobile will soon shift from being the exception to being the rule, and successful collaboration solutions will reflect this.

5. From vision to action

The purpose of collaboration tools is not just better communication — it is to get real work done. Software will continue to make huge strides in terms of helping teams of people turn vision into action more effectively and more efficiently than ever before. Executives must encourage the use of these solutions by being avid users themselves. Those that are successful in leveraging these capabilities will have a significant competitive advantage.

Blaine Mathieu is the chief products officer at Mindjet, a provider of collaborative work management solutions.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Ernst Vikne.

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In the middle of a lengthy article in the MIT Technology Review about productivity gains expected from the increased prevalence of the virtual office, Andrew McAfee offers a few interesting tidbits about what aspects of traditional working life will likely remain basically unchanged going into the coming decade. He writes that

while the physical office is changing, certain connotations of the word “office” are not. I can think of at least two — “hierarchical organization” and “place for human interaction” — and there’s no indication that these are becoming any less important. Even the most progressive high-tech companies retain many of the organizational trappings of their industrial-age predecessors: full-time managers, org charts, job descriptions, and so on. And since humans remain social animals, conventional gathering places will remain important in business…

McAfee’s idea that hierarchy and org charts are here to stay stirs up an interesting debate about whether the content of those org charts will nonetheless change due to evolving tech tools. Some feel that new collaboration tools will inevitably lead to flatter structure.  On WebWorkerDaily, for example, Andy McLoughlin has argued that:

Cloud collaboration tools remove these barriers and enable everyone to connect and work with everyone else. Information can be easily shared, knowledge “gate keepers” are removed, people can see who is contributing to projects (and who isn’t) and traditional business hierarchies start to crumble. Everyone from the managers in an organization to interns can benefit from the flat structure that web-based collaboration tools are starting to nurture.

In this vision, the org chart may continue to be dutifully drawn up but going forward it will be less and less relevant to how business actually gets done, no longer really constraining or describing who works with whom.

Are you with McAfee or McLoughlin – are collaboration tools bound to flatten organizations or are traditional hierarchies here to stay?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Nils Geylen.

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