After several years of rapid feedback from users, collaboration software has become an increasingly integral part of how work is organized and carried out. As more companies rely on tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams and others, IT leaders are looking to deploy a new class of collaborative tools across the enterprise to boost productivity and connect disparate teams.
During 2017, team collaboration software matured as a business option with the launch of the Slack business edition for large-scale deployments and Microsoft launched Teams to put group chat in the hands of many Office 365 subscribers. Numerous other providers they mobilized to capitalize on the opportunity created by Slack with their own group chat offers, such as Atlassian's Stride, even when Cisco and Facebook continued to build their existing platforms.
"The collaboration is hot, it will stay warm," said IDC research director Wayne Kurtzman. "Collaboration platforms represent the opportunity for digital disruption, they are driven people, use new behavioral metrics and positively affect standard commercial KPIs, and that trend will continue."
The scenario is now ready for a competitive market as more companies invest in software to connect their employees. "We are still ahead in terms of companies that have enterprise-wide deployments, but they will see in 2018 that there will be a good deal of momentum behind the large-scale deployments," said Irwin Lazar, vice president and services director of Nemertes Research.
Group chat as the center of productivity of the office
One of the main trends that emerged in the last year is that group chat is quickly becoming the center of productivity.
That is reflected in the strategy of several unified communications providers, said Lazar. For example, Microsoft plans to phase out Skype for Business, and computers will gradually become their primary communications tool. And RingCentral acquired Glip to make it its main communications client.
"When team collaboration applications used to look like an adjunct, now you're starting to see a lot of applications going into them," Lazar said. "If I'm working with my team, I live in the team's application, but if I want to share a document, I share it in the team's application." If I want to open an application, I release it, potentially even through the team's application. that becomes the digital center of the workplace. "
Video conferencing is another aspect of communication that is being incorporated into team collaboration platforms, and screen sharing is also becoming more advanced, said Richard Edwards, director of services and distinguished analyst at Freeform Dynamics.
"The most important aspect of [change] to 2018 is the ability to switch between short messages and perhaps some attachments to be able to enter a group conference call and maybe even scale that up and do some screen sharing and bring in a lot of third parties. more easily than would be the case today, "said Edwards.
Despite an increasingly competitive market, the large-scale integrated adoption of collaboration tools at the corporate level has yet to be done. Most companies are using these tools in silos on all computers, with little strategic planning around who uses what. A group of developers could be using a tool, for example, while the marketing department is using another.
That probably changes as the team's collaboration becomes more popular; IT administrators will have to adopt a more thought-out approach to implementations.
"It's starting to change," said Lazar. "The conversations that I am having with IT leaders are that they are starting to try to think a little more proactively and want to plan the implementation of these applications in the next year or two."
Helping to drive this type of investment decisions: the understanding by companies that they are beginning to reap the benefits of connecting equipment and facilitating the exchange of information and ideas.
"They see the value, they see that collaborating in the context of a team space is much easier than trying to use e-mail," said Lazar. "It's much more intuitive [and] aligns with the needs of mobile workers ... The context of being able to converse within a space reserved for a specific topic, instead of having to have everything sitting in your inbox, it's just a much better way to work. "
Slack's challenge: attract large corporations
In many ways, Slack is responsible for the growing interest in group chat, which is reflected in the company's impressive growth. In September, the company announced that it has 6 million daily active users, compared to 5 million in January, and $ 200 million in annual revenue. The number of people who pay for their services has also increased. This summer, the company reached 50,000 paid equipment users, compared to 38,000 in January, and 2 million paid individual users, compared to 1.5 million at the beginning of the year.
Earlier this year, Slack began to actively focus on deployments in large companies with the launch of its Enterprise Grid product. The business edition includes advanced security controls and administrative and user functions for an unlimited number of workspaces. It is designed to support implementations in companies with tens of thousands of employees with separate but connected workspaces.
Convincing more users to adopt the service is the next big challenge.
"At the moment, the only thing that is holding Slack in the company is what has made them popular at this point, and that is sold by team by team," said Gartner research director Larry Cannell. "When you sell to a bigger company, you have to sell it to a company, and your Grid product is trying to do that, which is an incredibly important product for them to stay and grow within the company."
Slack also has other concerns, such as a lot of rivals trying to catch up and launch their own team tools that in many ways mimic the Slack interface. This includes Atlassian Stride, Zoho Cliq and, of course, Microsoft teams. The teams reach general availability in March of this year and have the strongest credentials to become a "slack assassin". Although there are weaknesses in the platform compared to Slack, as a possibly more complex interface, Microsoft has a clear advantage with its Office 365 integration.
Microsoft Teams gain momentum
"The dynamics of the market that we have seen in the last year is that Microsoft has the momentum, for the simple reason that we see the percentage of companies that use Office 365 and it is very high," said Lazar.
"Because Teams is free with an E3 or E5 license, it's very difficult for someone like Slack to say, 'Hey, you have to pay us for the Enterprise Grid product.'"
Business customers are doing two calculations. One implies cost, said Lazar. The other involves Microsoft's decision to integrate teams closely into Office 365, "to the point where I can enter a team space and look at a document in which my team is working and edit it directly within that team space."
It is also possible to co-direct documents. "So they could be editing a document together while we're chatting, or if we need to talk live, we click on a link and now we have an open voice channel between us," he said.
"Those are the kind of things that Slack and Spark and really all the other competing products can not do, because they do not have that tight integration with Microsoft Office environments." So, for companies that are collaborating a lot with the documents of Office, it's hard to beat the teams. "
Even so, Slack is likely to remain the preferred team collaboration tool for many, especially in companies that are not closely linked to Microsoft, or that are considering Slack's ability to integrate with Oracle, SAP, Salesforce and other applications. CRM provide a central workspace, said Lazar.
Cannell de Gartner agreed that Microsoft will be a major player in the market in the next year: "The collaboration market is looking over their shoulders in Office 365 and they are trying to discover what their weaknesses are and where they can compete against he and where are the gaps that could fill ".
Google and Facebook make their own movements
Google announced its own Slack competitor this year, splitting its Hangouts platform into two products: Meet, a dedicated video conferencing tool, and Chat, which supports group conversations and links to G Suite files.
"If Google follows their plans with Hangouts Chat and integrates them with their team units, it could have a strong offer of team collaboration," said Cannell. "At the moment, I think Google is a bit behind the market when it comes to team collaboration."
While Google has a strong portfolio of productivity and file sharing as part of G Suite, a tool like Google Docs is currently focusing more on making personal documents available to colleagues, rather than supporting more advanced collaboration.
"Whereas if you look at Slack, Slack creates a team space where we have a team conversation, and Microsoft Teams also creates a team conversation, but also a team file exchange and a team repository space," Cannell said. . "So I think Google has something to do with the team's collaboration space."
Facebook, which has a slightly different approach to collaboration with its business social network Workplace, also continues to evolve. One year after its official launch, Workplace is now used by 30,000 companies. That list includes retail giant Walmart, a major customer victory announced in September, and Virgin Atlantic.
The airline launched Workplace at approximately the same time in an attempt to improve the exchange of information between front-line personnel and senior executives. It currently serves primarily as an intranet for internal communications, although the company plans to integrate other applications and processes over time.
Since its launch, Workplace has seen better adoption than expected, according to Virgin Atlantic CIO and senior vice president of technology at Don Langford. Virgin Atlantic now has 7,000 people in the workplace, an adoption rate of around 70%.
With so many options and features underway or evolving, companies looking for a unique collaboration platform may have to make some difficult decisions.
"Many [collaboration] companies are already focusing on features that will help differentiate them from the others," Kurtzman said. "Who has the best set of features can change from month to month, so you may have to choose the company that has the vision that best suits the changing needs of your company."
