Cloud applications and services vendors who specialize in remote work technology are fast coming to the realization that if they don't help customers -- and their IT admins -- during the global coronavirus work-from-home quarantine, some might go out of business.
In response, vendors are offering for free some of the products for which they normally charge, including productivity and management tools for remote work as well as security tools.
PandaDoc, which integrates with CRM platforms to process transactional documents such as contracts and proposals, made free a $25 per-user, per-month e-signatures package that includes payments processing. CEO Mikita Mikado made the call after reading an angry reply to a sales email a rep had forwarded from one of the company's 17,000 enterprise and SMB customers.
"He said, 'Are you nuts? Why are you trying to sell me now? You should be offering something for free,'" Mikado said, adding that the customer called his company's sales outreach a "PandaDoc fail," requested to be removed from mailing lists and canceled a free trial.
Mikado responded personally to the customer, agreeing that the sales outreach was tone-deaf. He also told the customer that his email spurred PandaDoc into action. The company had noticed an uptick in e-signature use as the coronavirus pandemic forced people to work from home and sales reps weren't able to ink deals in person. E-signatures quickly changed from a convenience to a necessity. So, the company made that service free.
"We're going to get into a recession," said Mikado, who hopes his move will help, in some small way, keep vulnerable customers afloat. "A lot of people are going to be deciding if they're going to cut a software tool, or fire somebody."
Wrike supports remote work management
Companies such as Google, Dropbox and Zoom offer free access to basic document collaboration and meeting tools as a matter of course. But for many managers who aren't used to managing teams remotely, work-management cloud applications such as Workfront, Trello and Wrike and can organize work and monitor team members' progress.
Wrike made its $9.80 per user, per month professional subscription free for six months to new customers and eliminated user limits for its approximately 20,000 existing customers. Moreover, Wrike quickly realized that the company also needed to help its customers use work-management platforms. Even those who were accustomed to remote work technology underwent a massive change when the entire office suddenly had to work from home to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
A lot of our customers -- some of them who already transitioned to distributed teams -- are absolutely not ready.
Andrew FilevCEO, Wrike
"A lot of our customers -- some of them who already transitioned to distributed teams -- are absolutely not ready," said Andrew Filev, Wrike CEO. So, Wrike began documenting advice from lessons its own employees learned when they began working from home, such as a tips presentation that overflowed live Zoom participant limits.
A flash survey Wrike conducted of 1,000 workers at companies with 200 or more employees earlier this month showed that about half (49%) had never worked from home, and another 23% said they only worked from home during special circumstances such as extreme weather or to care for a sick child. More than half (52%) felt remote work would harm productivity.
"We want to be helpful adapting to and navigating the transition," Filev said. "There's a lot of work still to be done."
Choose free remote work tech carefully
Just because something is free to acquire doesn't mean it's free to implement, points out Forrester Research analyst Andrew Hewitt. Companies scrambling to enable teams to work remotely should take into consideration the costs of security and usability.
"Almost every technology purchase has a long tail of RFPs [requests for proposals] where enterprises evaluate how secure the technology is, and how it integrates with their existing infrastructure," Hewitt said. "With the free purchases, there's not enough time to realistically evaluate how secure any of these technologies are."
He advises companies to go with known vendors with a proven track record of enterprise security, as opposed to taking chances on cloud vendors they've never heard of. usability testing with end users is crucial during normal times, but that might not be possible as whole companies suddenly pivot to remote work.
"This is less of an issue right now since speed is of the essence," Hewitt said. "But enterprises may want to revisit these 'purchases' further down the road and see if they truly do fit the long-term business need."
New customers can get up to 100 free AppDynamics SaaS licenses through July 15; new and current customers can get a free 30-minute meeting with a technical consultant and free access to the company's Premium University through May 31.
