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Mattermost touts open source, private cloud alternative to vendor-hosted collaboration RAUL CASTANON-MARTINEZ 23 JUL 2018 The company aims to address the requirements of security- and privacy-minded organizations with an open source, private cloud alternative to vendor-hosted collaboration tools such as and Stride.

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Mattermost is part of a wave of companies that emerged in the last two years focused on providing open-source, private cloud alternatives to cloud-based collaboration and productivity tools such as At- lassian Stride, Dropbox and Slack. Security- and privacy-minded organizations –including high-profile organizations like Uber and the German federal government – are moving away from third-party plat- forms. Together with incidents such as Slack’s recent service outages, this is placing the spotlight on the benefits of open source, self-hosted team collaboration offerings like Mattermost.

THE 451 TAKE Vendor-hosted products in the collaboration space have gained a dominant mindshare but recent events are placing the spotlight on private cloud alternatives. Mattermost is well positioned to benefit from this opportunity. In the two years since launching its enterprise edition, the company has built an impressive roster of clients that include well-known brands and government agencies. These provide a solid proof of concept for the platform’s capabilities and value proposition. Its main challenge will be expanding its PR and market education efforts in order to bring awareness to the benefits of private cloud alternatives and gain more visibility in the collaboration space.

CONTEXT Mattermost offers high-trust collaboration and messaging on an open source platform. It was founded in 2015 as Mattermost by CTO Corey Hulen and CEO Ian Tien using the corporate entity from the original video games company SpinPunch founded in 2011. The company is based in Palo Alto, California, and currently has 50+ staff on payroll. It has raised an undisclosed amount backed by s28 Capital, Y Combinator, the Stanford University StartX Fund and private investors. Mattermost was created following the founders’ experience with collaboration tools at a prior venture, an online video game company. The team relied on a centrally hosted chat tool that was eventually acquired, resulting in sev- eral problems in terms of reliability and access to archived data. They decided to develop their own team collabora- tion tool based on the messaging software they had already developed for their gaming applications. The company open-sourced the team’s work in June 2015, leading to rapid adoption and requests for advanced enterprise fea- tures. This led to the company shifting its focus to building a business around Mattermost, shipping a commercial ‘enterprise edition’ version in March 2016. The company focuses on Global 2000, enterprise and privacy-conscious midmarket and small and medium busi- nesses (SMBs) seeking process improvement or the replacement of legacy systems using collaboration tools inte- grated with custom security, compliance and audit infrastructure. Its customers deploy Mattermost in private AWS, Azure or cloud environments as well on-premises. Customers range from Global 2000 enterprises including four of the world’s 10 largest banks, two of the three largest semiconductor manufacturers, two of the world’s three larg- est mobile phone companies, two of the three largest US federal agencies, and two of the three largest aerospace companies. Its customer base also includes midmarket organizations including Funke Mediengruppe, Galois and Wargaming (creator of the “World of Tanks” online war game franchise). Also, Uber has publicly revealed that it uses a customized version of Mattermost for enterprise-wide communications. PRODUCTS The company has three product lines. The Team Edition is an open source, private cloud team communications offering, free to use under MIT license. It provides a broad range of modern end-user features including enterprise messaging (one-to-one and group messaging, public and private channels, threaded messaging and multi-team support), expression and sharing (file sharing and file previews, video/audio playback, link previews, emojis and cus- tom emojis, GIF selection, sharable theme colors, custom display options), content organization (message flagging, channel archiving and search), attention management (mentions, granular notifications, alerting on keywords, Do Not Disturb mode, presence indication), extensibility (support for integrations, bots, plus plug-ins for voice/video/ screen sharing solutions such as Zoom and developer tools such as ), plus web, mobile and desktop applications. 451 RESEARCH REPRINT

The platform provides a web-based system console for administration, a command interface for management and scripting, and a bulk load tool for running ETL to migrate users and message histories from legacy systems. Mattermost runs as a single, upgradable -binary compatible with either a MySQL or PostgreSQL database, with options to deploy using Docker and Kubernetes. For developers, it provides layered extensibility ranging from simple webhooks accepting curl commands to bot and integrations frameworks, a rich plug-in architecture across server and client experiences, and full access to system APIs with language-specific drivers. The platform is designed as an open source ‘Slack-alternative,’ supporting Slack team import, Slack-compatible webhook integrations, keyboard shortcuts, slash commands and even theme colors. Mattermost also aims to ad- dress gaps in Slack’s user model, such as allowing for non-English characters in channel names and offering Twitter- like hashtags using the # character to quickly label and threads. Each open source Mattermost server provides the core features of Slack and supports hundreds of teams per instance. The company states that over ten thousand Mattermost servers are downloaded monthly. Team Edition auto-deploys from leading public cloud marketplaces including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud, and works with leading virtualization and orchestration platforms including Docker and Kuber- netes. Mattermost collaborates with over 1,000 open source contributors to continually improve the software and its distribution. The system is available in 14 languages including English, German, French, Dutch, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. The Enterprise Edition is the commercial, private cloud enterprise communication offering built on top of the Mat- termost open source project. It is available in two tiers. E10 is priced at $39 per user per year with annual billing. Key features include Active Directory/LDAP single-sign-on, advanced permissions, encrypted push notifications via HPNS, multi-factor authentication and commercial support. E20 provides additional advanced control features including SAML single-sign-on for Active Directory Federation Services, Okta, OneLogin and other SAML login op- tions, high availability mode with support for multi-node databases and application servers, Elasticsearch, custom data retention policies, integration to EIA systems such as Actiance and Global Relay for eDiscovery, and advanced mobile security EMM and Enterprise App Store support. E20 also includes an open source load test server to confirm that a newly deployed system can properly scale to 60,000 concurrent users in one team. COMPETITION Mattermost competes with other self-hosted collaboration and productivity tools such as Lync and for Busi- ness; Microsoft’s self-hosted messaging solutions; Cisco Jabber, which is built on an open standards messaging technology purchased by Cisco in 2008; Atlassian HipChat Data Center, a self-hosted messaging offering launched in 2017; IRC, the open source text-based communicator on which Slack was based; and Rocket.Chat, an open source team chat software solution based on MongoDB. Within the larger collaboration space, key competitors include vendor-hosted tools such as Slack and Atlassian Stride. 451 RESEARCH REPRINT

SWOT ANALYSIS

STRENGTHS WEAKNESSES Although still a young company, Mattermost Self-hosted products are a compelling alterna- has a strong track record working with well- tive for security- and privacy-minded organiza- known organizations and government agencies tions but cloud-based offerings tend to have a with strict privacy and security requirements. dominant mindshare. Mattermost can benefit These provide a solid proof of concept and vali- from expanding its PR and market education ef- date the company’s value proposition. forts to gain more visibility.

OPPORTUNITIES THREATS High-profile organizations are moving away There are many large, well-funded vendors in from third-party platforms; this not only puts the collaboration space; even though their fo- the spotlight on private cloud alternatives, it in- cus has been on cloud-based approaches, they dicates there is a market need for products like could decide to include a self-hosted alternative Mattermost. in their portfolio.