The days when Slack was dominant in the workplace collaboration apps market seem to be over. A new study shows that Microsoft Teams is now the most popular collaboration app among companies. It also seems that this will continue to be the case in the future.
At least that is what Spiceworks states on the basis of a survey among 901 organisations. The study showed that 21 percent of the companies now use Microsoft Teams. 15 percent use Slack. The most popular business collaboration app is strikingly showing another Microsoft product: Skype for Business (44 percent).
Continues to grow
Microsoft Teams was taken out of the beta phase in March 2017 with a lot of bombardment, but even before it became available, Spiceworks already stated that it would become more popular than Slack. That’s a quick fix. But it seems that the growth is far from over and that Microsoft Teams will be able to list a lot of new organizations in its customer base in the coming years.
The study shows that, by the end of 2020, 53% of companies plan to use Skype for Business. In addition, 41 percent want to switch to Microsoft Teams; 18 percent Slack and 12 percent to Google Hangouts. Interestingly, only one percent of companies plan to use Workplace by Facebook.
Rapid growth
According to Spiceworks, the rapid growth in the number of customers of Microsoft Teams is easy to explain. Most likely this is due to the fact that it costs nothing extra for users of Office 365, according to Peter Tsai, senior technology analyst of Spiceworks in a statement. Last July, Microsoft decided to offer Teams free of charge for Office 365 subscribers.
Although Skype for Business remains the main app overall, Microsoft is putting more emphasis on Microsoft Teams as the main communication app within Office 365, which for many companies is the reason to try it, says Tsai. As a result, we are likely to see the number of users of Teams double in the coming years.
The fact that Slack is less popular is not good news for the company. It wants to make an IPO in the first half of 2019 and would like to raise at least 10 billion dollars. Yesterday it turned out that Slack had attracted Goldman Sachs for that.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.