Unlocking Seamless Cross-Platform Collaboration: Tom Hadfield on SADA's Cloud and Clear Podcast

Check out Tom Hadfield, CEO of Mio, on the latest episode of SADA's Cloud and Clear podcast. Find out why Mio is bringing seamless cross-platform collaboration between Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, and Slack to enterprises around the world. Watch the full video and read the transcript below.

John: Hello, you're listening to another episode of Cloud and Clear, SADA’s cloud transformation podcast. I'm your host, John Veltri, and today we're pleased to welcome Tom Hadfield, founder and CEO of Mio, to the show. Before we get started, don’t forget to like and subscribe to our channel on your listening platform to stay updated on the latest Cloud and Clear episodes from SADA.

Tom, welcome to the show.

Tom: Happy to be here, John. Thanks for having me.

John: Tom, can you give us some background on Mio?

Tom: Yeah, Mio provides an interoperability solution for Google Workspace customers who are also using other collaboration tools like Microsoft 365 or Slack. We live in a world [where], remarkably, even in 2024, Microsoft Teams users can't send messages to colleagues using Google Chat or Slack, for example—until now. So now Google workspace customers have the option of using Mio to connect everyone in their company, so that they can collaborate seamlessly cross-platform, even if they’re using different collaboration tools.

John: Sure. It might seem like a very simple question, but can you elaborate on why customers might be using multiple collaboration tools and not standardize on one specific channel?

Tom: Of course. In fact, almost all large companies, once you get above a thousand employees, find themselves confronting this challenge of multiple collaboration tools. Our research shows that about 91% of enterprise customers are facing this problem.

There’s a number of drivers for that. One is mergers and acquisitions. So obviously once you get to a certain size, it becomes fairly common to acquire other companies. And chances are, they’re not going to be using the same collaboration stackers as you. Another driver for fragmentation in the collaboration stack is frontline workers. Increasingly, we’re seeing companies giving digital identities to their frontline workers. But they may be choosing to give them Google Workspace frontline worker SKU, even though everyone at the office, all the knowledge workers, might be using Microsoft 365, for example. We see regional variations, so some companies may find themselves using Microsoft in China, for example, but Google Workspace in the rest of the world.

And then obviously just legacy reasons. A lot of companies still have engineers using Slack that are operating in their own silo, unable to communicate with the rest of the company who may now be using Google Workspace, for example. So there’s a number of drivers. But despite the fact that CIOs we talk to want to get onto one collaboration platform, it’s proved to be elusive for most of the folks we work with.

John: Yeah, here at SADA, we see this clearly as a problem everyday, every week engaging with customers who are Workspace customers, who are organization customers who want to work with them. Can you give us some specific examples of customers you've helped solve this problem for?

Tom: Absolutely. We recently started working with a U.S.-based communications company, a very large communications company, that went through a major M&A transaction–they merged with another company. Our customer was using Google Workspace, the company they merged with was using Microsoft. It was very important to the CIO that on day one after the merger they could collaborate with each other. But they did not want to force the other company to migrate to Google Workspace immediately. So they were planning some period of coexistence between Google and Microsoft after the M&A transaction.

We also work with a very large consumer packaged goods company, you would know many of their brands. They have their frontline workers in the factories using Google Workspace, and all of their knowledge workers in the offices are using Microsoft 365. That’s increasingly common.

We also have worked with a couple of very large professional services organizations, consulting  firms—3, 4, 500,000 employees worldwide. Some of the regions of the world are using Microsoft; some other regions are using Google. But obviously those client teams have to work together across regions. Just as they’re sharing Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets files with each other, needing to collaborate cross-platform, they also need to be able to chat with each other and share files with each other cross-platform as well. There’s a wide variety of different use cases, but I think you’ll find it’s more rare to find a company that is only using one collaboration tool than it is to find a company with at least two or three.

John: Yeah, departmental, like you said, acquisition, absolutely. So, essentially, you're helping companies seamlessly communicate across multiple channels, multiple vendors. Can you share more about how your interoperability suite of tools makes this even easier for these companies?

Tom: At the core of what we offer, John, is chat interoperability, and so the foundation of cross-platform collaboration, from our point of view, is real-time chat between all of the employees in a company, regardless of which tool they’re using. In basic terms, that means that a Google Chat user can go to the search bar and search for a colleague, Tina, who’s using Teams, and find Tina in the directory in Google, send Tina a message from Google, and she will receive that message inside Teams, where she spends most of her day. It looks just like another message that she would receive from any of her other colleagues who are using Teams even though it was sent from Google Chat. So Tina can reply, that message goes back to, let’s say Greg, the Google user, and Greg receives that message inside Google Chat. So now they’re having seamless cross-platform chat, which doesn’t sound earth-shattering to us because as consumers, we’re used to using SMS to send a message from a Verizon user to an AT&T user. We don’t really care what carrier the other friends are on. But in the workplace, we still have these silos and cross-platform chat is really at the core of it. Of course, once you support cross-platform chat, you need to be able to post files into the channels or into the direct messages or the group chats. So we also support the ability for a Google user to post a Google Drive file into a chat message and have the Microsoft user click that link and authenticate using their Microsoft credentials and collaborate on that file as if they were a part of the same Google domain. So, really this is just about cross-platform communication that is native for the end user so it looks and feels like they’re collaborating with someone on the same platform as themselves, even if some of their colleagues are using different collaboration tools. 

John: Pretty awesome to be able to connect different, disparate businesses, disparate channels within the same company and help manage a communication challenge that existed for as long as I’ve been doing this professionally. Pretty Cool.

Tom: I appreciate you saying that. You know, I actually think it’s going to be very normal pretty soon. We’re so used to the fact that our Google Chat spaces only have Google users in them, or when we go to the search bar, we can only send messages to other Google users. I propose that that’s crazy. A few years from now, it’s going to be very normal to be in a Microsoft Teams channel or a Slack channel or a Google space and have all of your colleagues, some of whom might be using Microsoft, some of them using Google, some of them using Slack, be participating in that channel, in that same communication. And that’s not going to seem innovative. That’s going to seem normal. We're going to look back on the time, just like in the late 1990s when Verizon users could only send SMS messages to other Verizon users. American Idol used to have an SMS number for AT&T users, they used to have an SMS number for Verizon users. You had to send the different votes to different phone numbers depending on which carrier you had, and that seems crazy now. But I think we’re slowly going to exit that world in the workplace and get to seamless cross-platform collaboration very soon.

John: So we all know security is wildly important. Most recent headlines in the technology industry reinforce [that] more so now than ever. When operating across multiple platforms and doing this integration, how can the organizations ensure they have the proper security measures in place?

Tom: Well, obviously, ensuring the security of our customer’s data is our number one priority. Ensuring that cross-platform collaboration meets the compliance needs of enterprise customers is also critical. Clearly, we have our SOC II certification available to our customers and we’ll go through the security review process. I think the most important point to highlight here about cross-platform collaboration is that Mio is not storing any of our customer’s messages or any of our customer’s files. Those messages and files are stored by Microsoft, they're stored by Google, but they’re not stored by Mio. So you’re not introducing another vendor that is storing your messages or files at all. In fact, we think that enabling your Google users to stay inside the Google client, and no longer needing to have a guest account on the Microsoft tenant of all of their collaboration partners, is a way to ensure that all of the customer’s files and messages are now staying within the company’s security parameter. They’re all now going to be archived and re-discoverable within one communication platform and it prevents the kind of sprawl of your collaboration estate that leads to your messages and files being stored in all kinds of systems. That’s really how we think about security here at Mio.

John: Nice. So, managing multiple vendor collaboration environments, whether it’s Google Chat, Teams, Slack, etc, has been a major issue for customers for a long time. What makes Mio’s approach to the collaboration challenge different from other interoperability efforts that have come before?

Tom: It's such a great question, John. Almost everyone listening to this podcast would remember going back to whenever they started in the IT industry, the idea of cross-platform chat has been a major problem for both consumers and enterprises alike. You think back to the early 2000s, you had the multi-headed chat clients like Trillion, which would connect AOL instant messenger and MSN messenger and Yahoo messenger together so that you could chat cross-platform. Back then, you had to login to three or four different services into a new client, like Trillion, in order to be able to message cross-platform. Later on, you had the emergence of open standards like XMPP and SIP that enabled chat apps like Jabber and Skype for business to be able to chat with each other. But again, it really was about the lowest common denominator: basic chat, text-only chat messages going back and forth, pretty difficult for the admin to set up. So these open standards kind of died away and the collaboration vendors eventually stopped supporting them.

To answer your question, what’s different this time is Mio’s technology approach, which we describe as API Federation. So the thing that’s different now to twenty years ago is the API-zation of the world, meaning that all of these modern collaboration tools have mature, comprehensive APIs. That allows us the third-party vendor like Mio to connect the Microsoft APIs to the Google APIs and the Slack APIs, and provide a high-fidelity, seamless experience for end users, where you can post threaded messages, reactions, edit and delete messages. You can post files, images, and GIFs. You can at-mention users, and have all these actions be mirrored on the other platforms. Because we are listening to API events on one side and posting API events on the other side. Turns out, API Federation is the right way to do interoperability. Open standards have proved not to work, not least because the collaboration vendors themselves will always only provide the most minimal support for those standards they can get away with.

So, we really do feel like this is a new era for interoperability. It’s the first time that you can have full, seamless interoperability between different collaboration tools. We think that’s what makes this different to previous interoperability efforts from the past.

John: Moving on from the topic of interoperable chat to what I find myself talking about on every one of these podcasts recently: generative AI. With everybody talking about generative AI, why is chat interoperability important as customers consider their AI strategy over the next six months to 18 months?

Tom: One of the reasons why Gemini is so powerful, John, is because it has access to the full breadth of the customer’s data—from the Google Chat messages, Google Docs, Sheets, and Calendar appointments. All of that data feeds Gemini and makes it one of the most powerful AI tools out there. The customers that also have some of their data inside the Microsoft ecosystem, because some of their users are using Microsoft teams, or because some of their files are in SharePoint, that data is not available to Gemini today. So Gemini is not as powerful as it could be because it cannot access all of the data that is currently stored in the Microsoft ecosystem. So it’s critical, if you’re a CIO or VP of IT today that’s thinking about your generative AI strategy, it’s critical that you’re also thinking about how you bring all of your data, including that that’s on Microsoft or Slack, into the Google ecosystem so you can power Gemini to the fullest extent possible.

Mio enables you to do that. When you sync Microsoft Teams with Google Chat, you’re effectively creating a Google Chat space for each of your Microsoft Teams channels. All of those Microsoft messages are now posted into those Google Chat spaces. That becomes available to Gemini as training data. When your files are stored in SharePoint, using Mio allows you to bring those files across into the Google ecosystem so the Google users can collaborate on them and make them available to Gemini. 

So we think that when we talk about collaboration interoperability, we’re also talking about AI interoperability as well. Because of the importance of bringing data from Microsoft and Slack ecosystems across to Google and vice versa. That’s why we’d encourage everyone, even if you have all of your users on Google Chat, if you’ve got any of your data in the Microsoft ecosystem, we also think it’s important for you to look at cross-platform collaboration.

John: I find this monumental in terms of organizations being able to communicate internally. Anything else you can share about the future [that’s] coming from Mio over the next six to 18 months from a roadmap standpoint?

Tom: Yeah, in terms of the Mio product roadmap, our vision is to build out a full interoperability suite across the full surface area of Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. So wherever there is any integration point between those productivity suites, we want to ensure that there is seamless interoperability and data sharing between the two. We've started with chat, we’ve expanded to files, and we also synchronize identities between Google and Microsoft. In terms of what’s next for us, we hear from customers that calendar interoperability is a high priority for them. I’m sure you hear that too, John. Although Google has their own native calendar interop solution, because it’s based on the iCalendar standard, it does have some real limitations, particularly as it relates to updating recurring events, for example. That’s primarily because Microsoft is not adequately supporting the iCalendar standard. We think it’s important to shift to an API-based calendar interoperability solution. That’s on our roadmap for 2025.

We are also working on external federation. Today, when we talk about cross-platform collaboration, we’re talking about it within the company. Our customers are using multiple collaboration tools for their internal communication. Next on the roadmap for us is wanting to chat externally with external contacts, partners, vendors, customers, who are using different collaboration tools. If there’s anyone listening to this podcast that is only using Google Chat–they don't have any Microsoft Teams usage, they don’t have any Slack usage inside their organization–chances are, that person also wants to be able to collaborate externally with vendors and clients who are using Microsoft or Slack. That external federation capability is also on our pipeline for next year. This is all part of our journey towards delivering a full, comprehensive interoperability suite for all of Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.  

John: That’s awesome news. As a person I see as a forward-thinker in this space [who’s] developing a new capability that hopefully a lot of organizations and technologists can really look to as a change or as a way to improve their business, do you have any advice you’d like to offer to some of these CIOs, VP of IT people in our industry that are focusing on chat collaboration and looking at their overall technology stacks, collaboration and communication stacks over the next two years?

Tom: Yeah, I think the number one priority for any person who is responsible for the collaboration suite of the company—whether that’s a CIO, the VP of IT, the director of employee experience, or collaboration engineer or manager—is that you have to focus on removing silos and removing barriers to collaboration inside your organization. This is the number one thing you can do to increase the productivity of the entire company. Make sure that everyone at your company can chat with each other in real time, they can all share files with each other, they can all collaborate with each other even when they’re using different collaboration tools. If you have the ability inside your organization to consolidate on one collaboration tool, and to eliminate all of the others, then you should do that. But if, for whatever reason, you can’t do that, because you have engineers who love slack, or you have knowledge workers on Microsoft, and frontline workers on Google, or you’ve just gone through an M&A transaction, or there are different reasons you can’t get onto one collaboration tool, then it’s critical that you look into interoperability to bring down these barriers to collaboration. It’s only when employees can communicate with each other seamlessly, cross-platform, that a CIO is really achieving their mission.

We’d love to help with that. We’d love to talk to any customer that is using Google Workspace alongside other collaboration tools and really encourage everyone to look into Mio and reach out to us.

John: I couldn’t agree more. Tom Hadfield, CEO of Mio, I appreciate you joining us today. I enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much for coming today.

Tom: Thanks, John. It’s been a real pleasure talking with you. I’d really encourage everyone to visit our website at www.m.io. There, you can learn more about our Google Workspace interoperability solution with Microsoft 365 and Slack.

John: And with that, we’ll say goodbye to our audience. Thank you for joining us here on Cloud and Clear. Please remember to like and subscribe, and we will see you next time.

Outro: Thank you for listening to Cloud and Clear. Check the show notes for links to this week’s topics and don’t forget to connect with us on Twitter at @CloudAndClear and our website, sada.com.