Facebook Workplace: Just collaboration, or parking its tanks on UCaaS & cPaaS lawns?

Facebook has finally launched its enterprise collaboration offering, changing its name to Workplace, from the original beta-tested Facebook at Work (link). It certainly isn't a full UCaaS product - but it wouldn't surprise me if it heads (somewhat) in that direction over time, or adds in integration or PaaS capabilities that allow it to compete indirectly in future.

It's aggressively priced, and mostly targetted at the Slack-style market for timeline- and messaging-centric collaboration, also known as WCC (workstream collaboration & communication). It's got a free trial, it's free for educational users, and for businesses it costs just $1-3 per month depending on size of deployment. (For comparison, Facebook's global consumer ARPU is around 4, mainly from advertising, although this is much higher in North America - link).

Clearly, it's majoring on large similarity in user-experience to its social networking platform, which is familiar to a large % of humanity. Likes, reactions, groups and so on are all replicated.

It also has some communications capabilities already - FB's Live video-streaming service is built into the main Workplace service, while it has a separate "companion" app (Work Chat - link) for IM and voice/video. I strongly suspect it is based on WebRTC, as its consumer equivalent is one of the biggest users of the technology today. Work Chat also has file/image-sharing and (not all entirely professional) stickers, which are basically glorified emoji. 

Interestingly, the iOS appstore page for Chat - which says it's already at Version 48 - has a screenshot focusing on voice rather than video, although that may just be because it hasn't updated it yet (there's an old website link to At Work rather than Workplace too).

Some other things I've noticed:

• It references trial user companies (for internal deployment) include telcos Telenor and Telekom Austria
• Its partners / distributors include a division of Phillipines telco PLDT
• Unsurprisingly, there's a big pitch on security, privacy and data-ownership for companies that may be suspicious of FB's record.
• There's a big pitch for non-desk workers such as those in restaurants, on ships or industrial facilities (who are mostly likely to be mobile-first / mobile only, and which are often well outside the traditional UC/UCaaS universe). 
• It's apparently air-gapped from the consumer Facebook platform - although given WhatsApp's recent history, some may speculate how long that lasts.
• There's a way to create multi-company groups for federation, and presumably closed groups for suppliers/customers/partners.
• Various 3rd-party providers of identity for single sign-on support (including G Suite and MS Azure).

In common with Slack and some other UC and WCC-type offers, it suggests that use of messaging and workstreams may reduce the need for voice/video realtime communications as well as email. Its FAQ says that "Companies find that they can eliminate or drastically reduce their need for internal collaboration tools such as their intranet, telephony systems, video conferencing and distribution lists."

That is quite telling for me: "reduce their need" implies that Facebook doesn't immediately see its role as replacing old phone systems or UC (or UCaaS), or that it intends to jump into the conferencing space. Perhaps I'm inferring too much, but I suspect it means:

• Facebook isn't interested in becoming a business phone system or normal UCaaS platform, especially with PSTN interconnect. In any case, it is unclear that businesses would accept it any time soon - it's taking Microsoft a long time to move on from IM/UC to telephony.
• The apparent enthusiasm of various telco partners could just indicate prudent curiosity - or could indicate a future alignment with network-based telephony and numbering, especially given Facebook's love of phone number-based 2-factor authentication.
• Also at present, Workplace isn't being set up as a mechanism for B2C communications, as many thought it might. In many ways, that's more a role for consumer Facebook (& consumer FB identities) and perhaps WhatsApp for chatbots. Businesses have to pay for various services around their pages already.
• However, it would be very unsurprising if Workplace became more of an integration platform in future. I can easily imagine it - or partners - building ways to link it to other telephony, conferencing or CRM/call-centre systems or cloud providers. 
• Workplace could potentially become a hub for Slack-style "collaboration as a platform", also being done in various ways by Cisco Spark, Symphony, Broadsoft Tempo, Unify Circuit and many others.
• Given Facebook's enthusiasm for live video-streaming, video-calling and other communications abilities (especially in-app on mobile) it would not surprise me to see a cPaaS play or acquisition at some point. I suspect it wouldn't aim to compete with Twilio directly, or some other UC-style rivals such as Nexmo/Vonage, but either Cisco/Tropo or Tokbox could be closer to the firing line. (Actually, Tokbox would be an interesting M&A target, if Telefonica decides it can't leverage it more than it does today).
• I expect that a major push will be made later around "events" which seems to be mostly missing from the current release, and which is a huge draw on the consumer service. Renaming it to "meetings" or "appointments" would make a lot of sense, and absorb much more communications traffic in consequence.
• Facebook has perhaps the best way to categorising personal "context" of any company. Its status updates have a great set of tags of location, doing/feeling activities, tagged colleagues/friends and so forth. It has the potential to leverage this in Workplace to create a really interesting platform for Contextual Communications.

Overall, I think that Facebook Workplace looks like a much more subtle and oblique entry to enterprise communications than some people expected. It's not aiming to replace UC/UCaaS outright, but instead to gradually divert (steal?) a growing slice of the overall employee-to-employee (or cross-company) communications pie. This is very different to the way that the traditional enterprise comms companies like Cisco or Avaya or various cloud-based providers are going, where they typically aim to be at the centre of a firm's communications, radiating outward from phone or conferencing. Instead, Workplace seems to be a play for adjacency, siphoning off use from email and Slack and peripheral (often unloved) UC features, at a low price point.

If companies can get over their privacy-wariness from Facebook's consumer reputation, it has quite a lot of potential. I also suspect it could be seen as attractive as a channel play by some telcos' enterprise business units, especially where they have minimal mobile footprint today. It would probably sit alongside other UCaaS offers rather than replace them. Thus far, it's a bit unclear what Microsoft plans to do with LinkedIn, but that's also in the same universe.

But Workplace also represents a starting-point for some really interesting future cPaaS and integration plays. Facebook's familiar UI - and its vast realm of heritage and skill in design and UX - could be a gamechanger. It is rightly eschewing "boring old business phone systems" for now - but should be able to help create a variety of new voice and video experiences in subsequent enhancements, if it proves the basics, gains scale quickly, and mitigates residual concern about security and privacy.

If we call the message/timeline concept WCC, maybe this will end up being called wPaaS?

Communications apps, APIs & integrations: Import vs. Export models

There is a huge and growing interest in blending communications apps/services with other software capabilities. We are moving from a world of standalone voice, video and messaging to a range of contextualised, workstream-based and embedded alternatives.

But there are two very distinct philosophies emerging for app/comms integration:

• Export: this involves extending communications capabilities out from a central system (phone system, UC, messaging app, videoconferencing etc) into other applications or websites via APIs, or by offering granular service-components (eg WebRTC gateway, transcoding, recording etc) via a PaaS approach. Numerous examples exist, from
• Vendors (eg Unify's Circuit APIs, Genband Kandy, Xura Forge, Cisco Tropo, ALU's Rapport APIs, BroadSoft, Vidyo etc)
• Dedicated PaaS providers (eg Twilio, SightCall, Temasys) or niche specialists such as Voxbone (which does numbering for example)  
  
• Telcos' API platforms, which may be network-integrated like AT&T's Developer Platform, standalone PaaS like Telefonica Toxbox, or even just web-embeddable objects like Telenor appear.in
• Import: this involves treating the communications application or service as the user's primary experience, and bringing in other applications as "integrations" or mini-apps. These can be other communications tools (eg WebRTC video windows in a messaging app) or other functions (eg social or process-based integrations). This particularly fits with the "timeline" or "workstream" model, or perhaps a "dashboard". Examples exist in a number of areas:
• Enterprise is moving towards "workstream collaboration and communications" (WCC) apps, such as Slack, Cisco Spark, Unify Circuit and various others which can embed external services into a timeline. BroadSoft's Tempo concept looks more like a dashboard model than a timeline, but also brings in sources like DropBox.
• Consumers are moving towards "Messaging as a Platform" apps, notably in Asia with WeChat, which embeds mini-apps such as taxi-ordering into the message stream. Facebook is taking Messenger in the same direction, and even telcos want to replicate this - Deutsche Telekom is trying to reinvent RCS to take it in that direction, for example.

The API-led "export" model has been the primary trend in WebRTC, SMS and telcos' network/IMS strategies in recent years. We hear a lot about the "consumption" of APIs, "embedding" of communications or the "exposure" of a core system. It is definitely growing rapidly, in numerous guises. Click-to-call buttons embedded in websites or apps are a typical manifestation. (Video below is embedding AT&T capability into Plantronics' website)

But the success of apps such as Slack and WeChat have led to a resurgence of the idea of "unifying" communications, or using a "hub" approach, where a messaging/voice/video app becomes the central anchor of a user's "online life", either as a dedicated application or browser home-page.

Some vendors are trying both approaches - Unify and Cisco seem to be looking at both import and export models. It might be where Google is intending to take Jibe along with telcos and Android as well. Some UCaaS players seem to be taking a similar path (eg with ThinkingPhones acquisition of Fuze) as well as WCC specialists like Atlassian's HipChat.

Others are taking different angles - Microsoft seems to be using Office 365 as the anchor, importing its own Skype4Business UC application as well as maybe others in future, probably via ORTC. I suspect it will "export" more communications as well, in future. Apple (as usual) is different, still using iOS as its main platform for very selective import of a few comms/social tools such as Facebook and Twitter, and largely avoiding any export models at all. (There is no way to embed FaceTime or iMessage in a website, for example). Apple also tends to dislike apps acting as subsidiary platforms on mobile, especially if there are payments involved.

It is too early - and too polarised - to determine whether import or export will be most significant, and for which use-cases and customer segments. We may see different "balances of payments" for different vendors and service providers. However, there are a number of early conclusions to draw:

• Import models need a good and usable / well-liked core product, before they can become a platform
• Export models need the right "raw ingredients", eg simple video or SMS APIs, with the right (typically freemium) commercial model to attract developers
• Import models tend to work best with a core that is text/timeline-based, ie non-realtime
• There is a risk that some import models appear as "arrogant": I can imagine some users thinking "What, you expect me to spend the core of my day in your app?! You must be joking"
• Export models face a lot of competition - external developers have many APIs to choose from, or can implement their own capabilities from scratch.
• Import models involve competition between comms tools and other apps as the "anchor" - eg a UC tool, vs. social networks, or an Office/Google Apps suite as hub, or major enterprise products like SAP/Salesforce, or a vertical-specific platform like a medical practice-management app.
• Import and export approaches often vary in implementation between Android, iOS, Windows and native chipset-level
• Telcos have been trying export models for a long time, with limited success. Often, 3rd party platforms that act as aggregators / or "export agents". Cable / IPTV companies are closer to the import model as they own the set-top box interface to "on-board" other solutions
• We might see NFV / VNF architectures helping with telco-grade import & export in future, but for communications services it's still a long way off
• Mobile app usage tends to be fragmented. With the notable exception of WeChat, it's not clear that a full import model works well with the app paradigm on smartphones. That said, we may see greater cross-linkage between apps in future.
• Certain groups of knowledge-workers may be more well-suited to "import" comms apps, especially if they are either communications-primary users (eg call centre agents) or heavily-collaborating teams.
• Design skills are paramount throughout, for integrations to be usable. 
• We will see some "importers" acquiring companies to extend the core app functions. Slack/Screenhero is a good example. This may compete with some 3rd-parties' integrations, but may also make life easier for iOS appstore approvals.
• Both import and export models make life much harder for network policy-management (or industry regulation) as mashups are by their nature hard to pigeon-hole. 
• Every export implicitly also means an import from the other side - sometimes into "product", but in many ways horizontal apps such as SAP and Saleforce are turning into full import platforms in their own right, especially where they support multiple communications integrations.

I think that 2016 is going to see some epic battles between import and export philosophies for communications in general, and WebRTC in particular. The shift of communications to the cloud facilitates both directions. Worth watching very closely indeed.

Stop Press: just as I was about to publish, I read that Facebook is trialling Uber-in-Messenger, as part of its "Transportation on Messenger" initiative. This is a great example of an import model, and "messaging as a platform". Details are here.