Communications tool Slack thinks big for business expansion drive
Communications tool Slack has laid out its strategy for future growth by announcing plans to sell a new technology product to some of the world’s largest businesses including IBM, PayPal and Capital One.
The Slack Enterprise Grid has been built for use by organisations with employee counts numbering in the hundreds of thousands in a marked change of scale from its current specialization in serving small startups and media firms with only a handful of staff.
At just four years old Slack has swiftly built a reputation for itself as a go-to messaging platform and collaboration tool for companies looking to streamline the process of internal communications between team members.
For the corporate world however Slack has had to layer additional security and regulatory approval to its product, allowing the tool to be sold to financial and health companies handling sensitive data.
Future growth may not be so easy to come by however with increasing competition coming by the way of Microsoft and Facebook which have launched their own workplace collaboration tools. The former is likely to be a particularly tough competitor with most businesses already committed to the Microsoft ecosystem.
Mindful of this Slack went so far as to take a full page ad in the New York Times to warn people away from Microsoft's wares.
Slack now counts some 38,000 paying companies on its books, generating annual revenue of around $150m.