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Interview: Josh Lee, CEO of Swit

Image source: Josh Lee, Swit

Interview

San-Francisco-based Swit is a burgeoning team collaboration suite, which released its first app in March 2019 and currently registers with over 450 companies. For users interested in unified communications and collaboration tools, the following interview with Swit CEO Josh Lee will be of interest. Areas covered include: why Swit fills a gap in the marketplace, Swit’s competitive advantages, Swit’s security governance, and a specific contrast with Office 365.

Image source: Josh Lee, Swit

Why is there a place for Swit in the communications and collaboration services marketplace?

92% of people have to use multiple apps within their company and until now there has been no companywide team collaboration app available! So we [at Swit] have seamlessly combined the two biggest components of team collaboration – messenger and task management. With Swit, users don't have to go back and forth between these two platforms any longer. This is a huge benefit for business productivity: industry data has revealed that when employees switch tabs or apps, it takes an average of 23 minutes to re-focus on their work.

What are Swit’s major competitive advantages?

Functionality: Our primary purpose is to give today’s professionals freedom from too many integrations or app hopping through chat, post, file sharing, various task managements, and still emails.
Workflow: We wanted to build one service for all teams. Agile methodology for software developers are not agile for digital marketers or sales reps. That’s why Jira, for instance, isn’t adopted for employees across all departments of a company.
Born for Enterprises: Existing team collaboration tools were designed for small-sized single teams only. However, enterprises have a number of teams, which means they need cross-team collaboration and management features. Our Premium tier, which will be available in September [2019], would be the one and only collaboration service that meets these types of need.
These three advantages also open up growth in the category. Sure, many will switch to Swit, but Swit’s offering also invites many new users to use a collaboration app/platform.

What security governance is in place to reassure current and potential Swit users?

All data in Swit is encrypted.
Swit uses Google Cloud’s symmetric key cryptography algorithm and applies Advanced Encryption Standard decryption.
All text data and files are stored using Google Cloud Platform (GCP) standard encryption, which prevents data hijacking primarily by hackers. [These data and files] cannot be understood or reprocessed because [hackers] do not know the security key [to] access them, even if they acquired data.
From the Enterprise tier, available from late Q3, the GCP Key Management Service is linked to transmit the encryption key in the data packet transmitted per communication section. This provides stronger security to protect against the security risk, even if the data in the client is hijacked.

Most members will have an Office 365 license. What problems exist with Office 365 that might encourage potential users to switch to Swit?

We’re positioning Swit as a facilitating tool for Office 365. [The problems with Office 365 include]: Planner (too easy), MS Project (too complicated), MS Teams (many issues). [For instance], Teams’ minimum security unit is their workspaces, which means they can’t invite different members for their (private) channels from those of other workspaces. I can list more than hundreds of reasons!

Additional feature releases for Swit will be announced in the near future.

Check out the Team Collaboration Data Quadrant on SoftwareReviews: Accessed August 19, 2019


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