Aside from disrupting existing industries, Information Technology establishes new ones. A story of an ambitious start up competing against the resources of tech giants for a golden mine of a market has become a cliché over the past years. However, some of the battles draw a bit more of our attention when the stakes are particularly high.
According to the latest valuation, which took place in summer of 2017, Slack, a recently appeared chat service that evolved into an agile business productivity tool, is worth USD 5.1 billion. While the top-flight investors are splashing the cash, Slack expands and serves 5 million users per day, nearly 30% of whom are paying for the subscription. At the same moment, Microsoft and other giants rub their hands and prepare to snap up the booming market.
However, the growth of the demand for a specialized and all-under-one-roof solution for corporate communications was predictable. The businesses of all sizes and many scopes are forced to constantly seek for a source to increase operational effectiveness to stay at par with the competition. Besides, IT has increased the value of intangibles like agility, quickness, adaptiveness and openness to innovation. All the factors are directly related to how flexible and fast is the communication designed within the working groups and the whole company. Therefore, a messaging platform already adopted by millions of users that is willing to transform to add maximum value to corporate clients seems like a perfect match for many industries and use cases.
While there are several alternatives on the market, such as Dropbox that provides advanced solutions for documents exchange for businesses, messaging-based platform seems like a more natural basis for a highly demanded corporate communications organizer. Minding that, Microsoft has recently introduced Teams – a direct competitor for Slack and soon we will now what the awaited competition will bring to the table.
Sources:
- http://www.forbes.ru/tehnologii/350335-ne-prosto-messendzher-pochemu-ocenka-servisa-slack-prevysila-5-mlrd
- http://fortune.com/2017/09/17/slack-raise-valuation/
I agree with you fully in that Slack has provided corporations in basis with exactly what they need: an easy and all-under-one-roof solution for corporate messaging. However in my opinion it is not just the flexibility of Slack as a messaging app within different teams. As in that sense it doesn’t differ from many competitors, except for maybe it’s ease of use. I think that the added value of many bots and integrations with other services such as monitoring for system administrators, tools for marketeers, built-in formatting for programmers, that make the system so interesting for corporations. They have made their system thoroughly accessible for any bots and other smart integrations. Against that, Microsoft Teams will still have a hard time.