Slack co-founder and CTO Cal Henderson. Image: Slack
Slack reveals how global companies with tens of thousands of employees are deploying its platform at enterprise scale.
Workplace communications platform Slack has revealed that, one year into its Enterprise Grid strategy, it has signed up more than 150 corporate giants.
Almost a year ago, I sat down with Slack co-founder and CTO Cal Henderson, who pointed out that the one big problem in the enterprise software space is, when it comes to CIO-led buying decisions, “no one thinks of the users”.
‘Slack has been the hammer that has helped us tear down the walls of silos across 21st Century Fox’
– JEFF DOW
This insight is valuable when you consider how Slack has spread, often adopted by start-ups and ambitious growth teams, and charging models only kick in when a critical mass of users adopt it.
The model has served the company well. Slack currently has 9m weekly active users and 6m daily active users. Out of these, there are 2m paid users and 50,000-plus paid teams. Revenues from subscriptions are understood to be at around $200m.
The rise of Slack has prompted some competition to emerge, such as Microsoft Teams and Facebook at Work, to name a few.
Slack knows well it could make a difference in the corporate space. A year ago today (1 February), it revealed Enterprise Grid, a solution designed for teams working in some of the largest companies in the world.
Slack’s Enterprise Grid is expanding
Over the last year, Slack has gained more than 150 Enterprise Grid customers from renowned businesses, including: 21st Century Fox, IBM, Capital One, Condé Nast, Intuit and Liberty Mutual.
Slack has also added new strategic partnerships with Oracle and ServiceNow to a roster that includes Google Cloud, IBM, Salesforce and SAP, and received two key information security certifications – ISO 27001 and ISO 27018.
Enterprise Grid enables Slack to be deployed at scale, as channels can be shared between unlimited workspaces and information can be easily found.
Workers and cross-company teams can build collaborative environments, creating Slack teams and disbanding and reassembling them into new teams as different projects come and go.
Slack is currently used by 43pc of Fortune 100 companies and, at any one time, there are 3.5m simultaneously connected users. Half of Slack’s daily active users are outside the US, with the top five countries being the UK, Japan, Germany, France and India.
“Slack has been the hammer that has helped us tear down the walls of silos across 21st Century Fox,” said Jeff Dow, CIO of 20th Century Fox, which uses Slack across its 25,000-strong workforce.
“It has enabled us to position Slack as the operating system of collaboration across 194 countries and 171 offices, pulling us together like nothing else has.”
Similarly, financial giant Capital One has 25,000 active Slack users in more than 20 workspaces on Enterprise Grid to speed up decision-making and boost collaboration.
“We recognise the need for our teams to have a platform by which they could really foster the intense collaboration that we knew they would need,” says Jennifer Manry, managing vice-president of technology at Capital One.
At the pace with which Slack is being adopted, Henderson’s user-led enterprise revolution is fully underway.
