Breaking vendor barriers: the Workspace 365 Movement for customers

We collaborate rather than compete, in order to ensure the best results for people who do ‘the real’ work. Partnerships are key to the success of Workspace 365. As you may have noticed, we work closely together with Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Value added Resellers (VARs) to conquer complexity for the workforce and to deliver a digital workspace with all the underlying services. However, MSPs and VARs are not the only ones we partner with. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) play a huge role in the way we develop our adaptive workspace. How this works? We’ll explain.

The Workspace 365 mission for our customers

To fully comprehend our relationship with ISVs, it’s important to understand why we do what we do. Our mission is to maximize the impact of people who make a difference, by conquering complexity and simplifying work-life.

Let’s start with what this means for you, the ones who use our adaptive workspace: our customers. We’re making an impact for you on two levels:

Level 1: Saving time by simplifying access to applications

The amount of available applications is increasing every day; there’s a different app for basically any task or process you can think of. Due to the rise of SaaS it has become easier than ever to start using a new application. This results in a workday that’s scattered across the web and devices, because people have to open (and login to) a new app for everything they do. This costs valuable time.

With Workspace 365, we want to bring your entire workday to one place. We want to unite all these different applications and provide one-click access to everything, without having to login again.

This can save you up to 60 minutes a day logging in and switching between applications, and almost 11 hours a year resetting passwords. We bring applications together with all other information, news, documents and more. Saving you time, effort, and streamlining your workday.

Level 2: Reducing the number of times you switch

We enable you to spend more time on your primary tasks, by making sure that you have to switch less between applications. To do so, we bring all your data and tasks to one workspace, so that you can execute most of your work there. We do this by taking specific pieces of information and tasks from external applications, and making them available within the workspace. We do this with the use of Micro Apps.

This way, you can perform specific tasks and search for and open specific information straight from your workspace, without having to open an external application. Think for example of submitting an expense claim, searching and opening a healthcare protocol, or checking a class schedule. Saving you even more time, and making you more efficient and productive.

In order to create these Micro Apps and make more and more of these integrations possible, we collaborate with ISVs.

We don’t compete, we collaborate

Together with ISVs, Workspace 365 develops Micro Apps and integrations of important features from the ISV’s software. This enables you to easily and efficiently work with that software, within your adaptive workspace. Together with all your other software.

But why do we do this?

Smart innovation: don’t reinvent the wheel

The simple answer is: there are many ISVs out there that are great at what they do.

Instead of doing the exact same as others are doing and trying to do it better, we prefer to utilise their knowledge and skills and optimally use what’s already there. That’s why we develop an agnostic platform in which you can integrate all your current and future technology. This way, everyone benefits.

You benefit from having one consistent platform where everything that’s relevant to you is united, and the ISV because their systems are not only used more efficiently, but the adoption of it is increased as well, since the most relevant functionalities are instantly available to users.

Stop wasting time and money

Collaborating instead of competing frees up our time and resources to focus on what’s really important: developing the best adaptive workspace for our customers, so they can focus on what’s really important as well. 

This is also apparent in the way we develop: what we develop for one customer, we develop for all. We do the research, we talk to users. And we don’t charge you any development or research costs for it. Because developing according to our customers’ needs only benefits the quality of our platform. While the development of custom software typically ranges between $40,000 and $50,000, and the cost of custom Micro Apps can even range between $15,000 to over $30,000. 

Unfortunately, this mindset is not as widespread as we would like. In many cases, the customer’s time and money is still wasted due to vendors focussing on their own product, instead of looking at the bigger picture. 

Fighting the vendor lock-in

We don’t just spend our own time and money wisely, we want to enable you, our customer, to do the same. That’s why we actively fight vendor lock-in: vendors “trapping” customers in their software, making them dependent from one vendor. They do this by closing their systems to other suppliers, and building them in such a way that their systems ‘don’t play well with others’. Ensuring that if you want to expand on your software, you don’t have much choice other than getting this from the same vendor.

This also often brings unnecessary costs, since these vendors frequently charge you for the development of these additional systems. This means you’d need to pay every time you need to expand on your systems, even if the vendor already developed almost the exact same system for another customer already.

However other vendors can’t expand on the existing software, and switching to a different vendor entirely can be a costly and burdensome process – something the current vendor is probably counting on, thus “locking you in”.

That somehow doesn’t sound entirely fair, does it? Tying customers to the company not because they want to and love what the company has to offer, but because they don’t really have a choice. And making you spend money unnecessarily on things that already exist – especially in the public sector, where resources are limited as it is.

An agnostic approach for technological freedom

That’s why Workspace 365 is fighting to eliminate this vendor lock-in. Not just by offering an agnostic platform which offers you complete freedom of choice when it comes to your technology. But by urging ISVs to open up their software as well and to adopt our mindset of collaboration over competition.

Because in the end, only one thing matters: your benefit. And ISVs can make that happen, together, instead of fighting unnecessary battles that complicate your work, as well as cost you time and money.

Tear down the walls: collaboration over ego

This is the movement Workspace 365 is creating in the market, and more and more ISVs are joining. It’s amazing to see what you can achieve when ego is set aside, and organisations start focusing on what actually brings value to you, their customer.

Do you want to experience the simplicity of the adaptive workspace? Try a free demo!