Zillable
Driving Innovation through Collaboration

Zillable provides a secure collaboration and innovation platform that empowers teams to collaborate, communicate, manage, create, engage, and interact across devices - without having to switch tabs or apps.In an interview with CIO Applications, Andy Pham, CEO of Zillable, talks about collaboration driving innovation in business. It was his belief in collaboration that inspired him to build this innovative platform to help organizations stay connected and streamline their processes.

What was the idea that led to the inception of Zillable?

Zillable started as a platform for patent attorneys going through the patent process. It was created to address the need for an innovation platform that would automate manual processes. For this innovative platform to work, we needed to bring in all these separate tools and have them work together. Consequently, we had to build a chat tool through which people could communicate, a project management tool that worked for complex workflows, a notebook for individual work, and so on. In the end, to fulfill this need, we needed to build a collaboration platform, and that’s what we ended up building. Once the platform was complete, we realized we had built something that could be used for all sorts of different processes, projects, and teams. At present, people use different tools to communicate and work, but these tools do not communicate with each other, which can create silos of information that slow down productivity and innovation. We’ve addressed this problem with one platform where we have all the different tools that people use like chat, cloud-storage, note-taking, document collaboration, and so on, but instead of having separate features,they are all built and deployed together and they talk to each other.

Could you give us an overview of the Zillable Platform and its functionalities?

We offer an online enterprise collaboration platform which brings all the great minds of your teams to one collaborative ecosystem. The platform has three key features: chat functions – what we call Spaces, a project management feature – Boards, and online document collaboration – that is, a feature where multiple people can work on a word document at once in real-time - zDoc. The platform allows teams of all size to chat, share content, share ideas, work together on documents, map skills across the network, and see big-picture data and workflows.

It gives managers the ability to map out workflows and link boards to recreate business processes from a bird’s eye view. That is, with the help of the Board map feature, users can compose and coordinate workflows by using smart bots to create, visualize, and automate the way tasks, content, projects, and so on move through the company.

zDoc, the document collaboration feature of the platform, revolutionizes word processing by letting you add content like files, tasks, polls, and checklists while messaging, commenting, annotating so contributors can collaborate on a living document in real time. Every document has chat and annotation built in so conversations and decisions stay where they belong instead of getting lost in emails. Spaces, our chat tool, promotes better communication and team transparency and provides a place to store and sort documents and other content. And with Maps,an individual can connect dots to obtain insights from the team better and faster. You can see how people, content, and workflows across your network are connected with the click of a button.

What value and efficiencies does your platform deliver to your clients?

An average large-size company uses 928 applications across teams and employees and there is no IT department in any organization that has full control over the apps that their employees use. This also means that they have no control over their company’s data. Employees can inadvertently disclose data internally or sometimes even externally. The biggest problem in this scenario is that most people don’t even recognize it -they might not even know their data has been compromised. Zillable eliminates the need for these apps, which helps eliminate securityrisks, by placing all your communication, tools, and content on one secure online platform that can be safely accessedby your employees from anywhere in the world. Clients can keep track of what is being disseminated and maintain control over the data and confidential information within the company. Plus, the added benefit of having one place for anything – besides the ease of finding what you need when you need it – gives top level individuals valuable insight into how the company is running.

Could you brief us about Zillable’s roadmap with regards to technological and geographical expansion?

Well, geographically, Zillable has people in California, New York, Chicago, The Philippines, and Vietnam. We’re already working together across timezones using this incredible tool we’ve created. And it works! Technologically, we’ve just added direct instant messaging (more like AOL or MSN) to supplement our existing chat tools (which are more like Slack). We’re working on adding video chat directly into the platform and are always working to make Zillable more intuitive and easier to use. Our biggest hurdle is that, with so many features, sometimes people find it intimidating. In many ways, this is a new thing. We’re moving in the other direction from a lot of the world – apps are proliferating at the speed of light with an app for every little thing. We think that’s unsustainable – eventually, people are going to want to start paring down and stop losing time switching between apps. Who wants to stare at a loading phone screen half the day? Ideologically, Zillable believes in nurturing ideas in order to continuously innovate. We think good ideas can come from anywhere and work hard to facilitate that. Zillable means able to be big. That’s where we’re heading.