Productivity platform flujo offers comprehensive solutions for a post-COVID world

While businesses in the country and across the globe are slowly reopening their offices to a lean and essential staff, the rest of us continue to be a part of what many are calling ‘the world’s biggest Work From Home experiment’. Organisations and employees have had to rethink not only how they work, but how they think about working. Concepts like connectivity and collaboration have taken centre stage, and the tools that enable them will lead the way to this transformation.

Organisations that have traditionally worked in silos are having to rethink how they can collaborate to enhance productivity. Some of the key challenges employees face include:

• The siloed nature of the tools available in the market for cross-functional communication and collaboration.
• Carrying out simple, yet key functionalities, like messaging, document sharing, tasks, meetings, and unified communication across different platforms.
• A reliance on endless switching between multiple platforms to get these tasks done.

Hyderabad-based flujo is a communication and collaboration suite for teams. With natively built key business essentials like messaging, audio/video calling, drive, meetings, tasks, calendar, notes, and kanbans, it creates a connected and productive workspace on a single platform.

Single platform, super productivity

flujo has been built on the pillars of Communication, Collaboration and Productivity and is designed to ensure faster and more efficient workflows by providing all the workplace necessities such as Calendar, Shared Drive and Messenger, among others, all on a single platform, thus doing away with the need to switch tabs multiple times to get basic, but essential tasks done. Each of these is packed with unique features that help team members focus on their essentials. Its USPs include:

• Fully functional communication tools.
• Seamless integration with other platforms.
• All productivity tools on a single platform.

The platform has certain key features that power Communication, Collaboration and Productivity.

Communication

Calls: Users can instantly connect with someone within their organisation or on an audio/video conference call with up to 50 participants.

Messenger: Users can replace their internal email communication with this powerful, secure and an easy to use messenger.

Polls: Users can get their colleagues’ feedback and views on any topic with easy-to-use opinion polls.

Collaboration

Meetings: Allows users to create, manage and modify your meetings in a jiffy. The platform has been designed to ensure that you never miss an important event again.

Drive: Allows users to Store and Collaborate without any limits with a native drive that offers 100GB of storage per user.

Tasks: Users can create tasks that can be prioritized according to their importance.

Productivity

Kanban: Users can plan, visualise and execute workflows with Kanban. With an agile practice like Kanban in place, users will never miss a deadline again.

Notes: Users can capture all their ideas, minutes of meetings, briefs etc. that they can share with their teams at any time.

Bot: The developers are working on a workspace assistant for the platform that takes on all the heavy lifting and keeps workflows organised.

“People need to communicate on a day-to-day basis. They need to collaborate and track deliverables using multiple platforms. At flujo, we are trying to solve the problem by bringing them under one roof. We believe this helps boost productivity too. Our USP is that all this is available with a simple yet powerful UI/UX, minimal learning curve, and affordability,” said Udaya Bhaskar Vemulapati, CEO, Flujo.

Prior to joining flujo, Uday had extensive stints as a Global Consulting Practice Head at Wipro, and as a faculty member of School of Computer Science at University of Central Florida in the US. The ambitions of the founders at flujo, their vision, and their hunger to take-on big players like Slack with a Made-in-Hyderabad theme clearly attracted Uday to start engaging with flujo. This energy from the younger team coupled with a seasoned strategic-plan and execution experience from Uday will help flujo become a globally competitive platform serving global customers.

“Everyone feels a sense of ownership in the company and we have an amazing culture here. Our biggest strengths are our team,” added Uday.

Challenges and the way ahead

Early issues faced at flujo included challenging and guiding the team to make sure that the product we are building is world-class. The team took on this challenge quite well and we quickly learnt from past mistakes. Today, flujo has a solid technical architecture, DevOps pipeline, stream-lined processes, and a stronger technical team that can work well.

Abhiram Deshpande, CPO and Founder at flujo owns the Product from design through Deploy. His attention to detail and his passion to make everything simple and intuitive comes through very clearly from rave reviews the team has heard on UI/UX from end users.

The product went through incremental iterations before releasing their first beta in September 2019 and are planning to take away the beta tag by the end of this quarter. Full functionality described here is available as a browser app at app.flujo.io and a mobile app flujo with messenger functionality is available for Andriod/iOS platforms with the rest of the functionality coming to mobiles in an incremental fashion over the next few months.

Uday feels flujo will be a game-changer with the majority of the workforce moving to a remote working culture. “We believe that everyone from startups to SMBs and enterprises can benefit from our solution, and be part of a journey in creating productive workspaces.”

The roadmap for flujo includes an enterprise-personal assistant (bot), extended integration with a larger set of enterprise apps and providing flujo APIs to enable a third-party marketplace of apps.

“The trend is changing, and due to the pandemic, we have no other option but to work from home, and Software as a Service has changed the IT world. flujo can be a great partner in these journeys. We intend to witness and be part of the culture shift in how teams work in the coming years,” he said.