Huddle draws in more risk-averse clients When Richard Williams" train was delayed this month on the way in to London for a morning executives" meeting, the chief information officer of Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance was unfazed. "My blood pressure stayed low and stable as I was able to work outside Basingstoke," he says. Two years ago I would have been apoplectic that I couldn't do that preparation in advance. The key to his cool was Huddle - a British software business that allows users to share and collaborate on documents that are stored securely in Huddle's cloud, using the device of their choice. On cloud nine Cloud services compared The platform has cut out what used to be two or three days of printing papers for Mitsui's board meetings and sending them by courier countrywide. Huddle has also helped stop inadvertent security breaches by frustrated employees emailing documents to private addresses, losing papers, requesting holes in the firewall or copying files to USB and other media. Huddle, founded in 2006 and recently selected as one of the UK's most promising tech companies, has emerged as a model for how British start-ups might challenge their American counterparts on the world stage. Instead of trying to attract a large number of individual users, Huddle has achieved scale and credibility by convincing risk-averse organisations - such as governments and financial services companies - to use it instead of Microsoft and Oracle. The company's latest gambit is the launch on Tuesday of Huddle Note, a mobile alternative to Microsoft Office. Huddle's announcement follows the September launch of a similar product from competitor Box, which was recently valued at $2bn after a $100m funding round. Huddle has also signed a deal with the United States Agency for International Development, according to a person familiar with the matter. It is the largest contract Huddle has won, and will involve replacing the agency's old systems and replacing it with Huddle's platform for the thousands of people who work with Usaid. "The thing about the government is it's really hard to sell to," says Jeffrey Mann of technology research group Gartner. But once you've fought your way past the ramparts of the castle, they're waiting for you and happy to take you into their deals. The Usaid deal seems to vindicate Huddle's ambitious expansion, under which it opened a Washington, DC outpost this year to improve its ability to sell to the federal government. Huddle employs 200 people and has offices in London, San Francisco and New York. "It's a bit like someone flicked a switch in CIOs at multinationals," says Huddle co-founder and chief executive Alastair Mitchell. In the past 12 months, he says, IT managers have changed from seeing cloud storage as an area of "ambiguity" to one of "certainty." The market for cloud services is increasing at 17 per cent a year and is worth an estimated $132bn in annual global sales, according to Gartner. Huddle's revenues are doubling year on year and the third quarter of 2013 was the company's most lucrative to date, says Mr Mitchell, although he declined to provide more detailed financial data. Huddle sells its software as a monthly subscription, with the price dependent on how many employees it will cover. There are risks. Apart from vigorous competition by other cloud storage providers, Huddle could lose out in the longer term to hybrid social networking and to enterprise services like Yammer, which Microsoft acquired for $1.2bn in 2012. To win the trust of large companies, Huddle has had to emphasise more sober qualities such as content management and security, notes Mr Mann. At the moment those clients "might think Facebook-style and enterprise social networks are too loosey-goosey," says Mr Mann - but that could change. Huddle is dipping its toe in the area, after announcing a partnership with enterprise social networking service Tibbr in October. Another risk is that the backlash against virtual eavesdropping by the US National Security Agency could make chief information officers cagey about giving up their data. Mr Williams of Mitsui says it is unlikely he would ever relinquish his company's most confidential material - such as trading data - to a third-party cloud provider. "Until there are widely accepted and proven security standards, and storage locations free from interference by outside agencies, I can't see how we can put our most sensitive data into the public cloud," says Mr Williams.