The great enterprise chat race

In opposition to all odds, Slack has emerged as the darling of organization chat.

The competitive deck seems nearly stacked Towards the startup, and it seems that each other month a new product launches from a main tech company that’s billed in the tech press as the next “Slack Killer.”

What Slack does isn’t honestly all that unique as startup thoughts cross. It merely provides an surroundings for groups to percentage records inside a chat customer. But it's been able to experience a wave of recognition attracting users, capital and a set of worth challengers.Even as Slack makes IPO-sounding noises, competitors continue to saddle-up. Perhaps, then it’s the perfect moment to take a look at the enterprise chat space and what all of this activity means for Slack as it battles the giants of the tech world.

Slack by the numbers

Since Slack launched four years ago it has raised over a half a billion dollars, pushing its valuation to $3.8 billion. What’s more, the company has gone from zero to 5 million daily active users in the same time period.
Those results have generated remarkably quick revenue growth. The company surpassed the $100 million revenue run rate mark last year, despite what appeared to be extremely stable per-seat revenue. That matters as the company rolled out its enterprise product earlier this
Microsoft Teams, which just announced full integration across Office 365, is at its heart, the tool for folks fully invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. Facebook at Work wants to be the communications tool for the entire company, regardless of your role. Google just announced it was splitting Hangouts into Chat (yet another “Slack Killah”) and video — and it’s going directly after Slack’s collaborative approach in the chat part.
Atlassian offers a wide range of collaboration tools that focus on different roles, Salesforce Chatter concentrates on life inside the Salesforce platform, Cisco Spark has broader unified communications ambitions, Yammer (which Microsoft purchased in 2012 for $1.2 billion) is an older attempt at the same idea, and Convo is a startup with its own cloud-based chat service, which hasn’t gained quite the same traction as these larger players.
Let’s not forget that none of this is new, and there have been attempts to sell this kind of software in the enterprise in the past. It just seems only in the age of mobile, social and cloud has it finally found a meaningful foothold and begun transforming the way people communicate across the enterprise.

In platforms we trust

Modern tech giants are platform plays with tendrils extending across product categories. That means that Google and Microsoft and Amazon and Apple sell music, and Google and Amazon and Microsoft will keep experimenting in social until something sticks, and explains why Google and Microsoft both torched billions of dollars trying to break into mass-market smartphones (Facebook and Amazon have history there as well), and on and on.


Slack’s key differentiator is that strives to be greater than a easy chat provider. It desires to be a platform in its personal proper, taking benefit of chatbots and plug-ins to be the middle of your paintings life. This may permit Slack users to get right of entry to statistics from many common business enterprise packages which includes Salesforce, Zendesk, SAP and others without leaving the chat purchaser. This potential to connect with different enterprise programs in a simple manner, giving users an extended-sought single location to paintings without having to constantly switch awareness, may be the name of the game to its success..

If Slack can plant the seed of a new productiveness platform inner of a dizzyingly expanding set of purchaser agencies small and huge, it’s attacking incumbents two times: If it could supplant different large-scale gear at large corporations, Slack undercuts employer-facing sales presently gathered, and if smaller agencies choose Slack and its nascent platform over conventional productiveness stacks, it is able to in addition undermine future income streams from those large corporations.

Towards that backdrop, it’s no surprise that these massive vendors see Slack’s talents as a chance and are attempting to undercut its impact by imparting similar capability, driven by using the electricity in their manufacturers.

However whether these incumbents can blunt the momentum Slack has built up in this sort of short time remains to be visible. At the same time as there’s in all likelihood room for a couple of winner in this area, Slack has proven its simple centralized workplace model might be a worthy adversary to some of the largest names within the enterprise.

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