Earlier this week I was having a conversation with a veteran Danish entrepreuner Dag Cummings who was one of the early key stakeholders in Microsoft when Teams was forming even before its launch. He worked in business to shape its launch and make it popular in the early days.
During our conversation he raised a topic which really shook me up. Later I went on to do a little resseach on it and found an enormous untapped potential for web based AR.
I'm going to write something that has never been discussed anywhere in the internet before. So you're reading it for the first time. I hope you'll enjoy today's article (with two major announcements at the end).
Microsoft SharePoint – It's hard NOT to hear about it
Perhaps you have used SharePoint at some point in your life somewhere. If not, then to add a summary, Microsoft SharePoint is a web based document management system, to collaborate, most common system used by companies across geographies.
As of today, more than 223,000+ companies worldwide are using SharePoint, combining a hopping 200 million users using it, resulting avg. annual revenue generation of $2 billion. Most companies in Information Technology and Services industry are using SharePoint today and more companies are moving towards online SharePoint than on-premise solution. Microsoft SharePoint Online is most often used by companies with 50-200 employees and 1M-10M dollars in revenue.
Clearly there's a huge market for it. There are more than 17,000+ job openings for SharePoint related jobs in LinkedIn. Although there are many competitive platforms equivalent to SharePoint, but clearly it is still number one in the global market.
How WebAR can make an impact to SharePoint industry?
Since SharePoint is a content management system, majority of its contents can be of various types – from word documents, spreadsheets, presentations or PDFs. However, a significant section of SharePoint is also used for product or service documentations. These are sort of external links like support documentations, shared documents between partners or resellers or potentil clients etc.
Product visualization or three-dimesnsional overview is crucial for many of them and web based AR could be a perfect fit for them. Although SharePoint has a provision for 3D display but in general it is with limited capacity and certainly does not offer any kind of AR associated.
This could be an interesting collaboration opportunity. WebAR URLs can be embedded as iFRame easily inside SharePoint. With a couple of clicks, SharePoint administrators can add them to the site. Companies who are selling expensive or complicated products can use this piece of technology to become a high performer in the industry, in terms of customer communication (which is always a better term for sales). The WebAR capability is a piece of cherry on top to enable the target audience to experience something that they have never experienced before with SharePoint.
Who could be the ideal customers if you sell WebAR?
Companies who are moving towards Microsoft SharePoint online (cloud transformation) along with a product portfolio to sale (b2b/b2c) can be targeted as an ideal customer base. Companies with $1M-$10M ARR often are flexible to find innovative ways to scale up their business and adopting new transformational technology is a part of their business growth. Pitching to this type of business could be a good idea indeed.
So what are you waiting for? If you have a solution offer, crafted for an industry, most likely you can land a customer from a $2billion ARR industry. Once you have successfully landed your first customer, rinse and repeat the same process to land more customers of similar profile.
Surplus – Top 10 list of SharePoint alernative competitors
1) Workvio
2) Confluence
3) Samepage
4) Igloo
5) Source by IC Thrive
6) Jostle
7) Glasscubes
8) Liferay
9) Simpplr
10)Workzone