American multinational IT company IBM has chosen ‘Slack’ to enable internal communication in the company. Slack is a cloud-based instant messaging platform that is popularly used in offices for all kinds of communication. IBM has over 3,50,000 employees and by choosing Slack for internal communication, it is a big win against Slack’s competing platform Microsoft Teams.
Before choosing Slack, IBM initially spent time experimenting with the platform until they were convinced to enable it for all employees. Their internal teams were already working on it back in 2014 and now, they have materialized the plan of moving to slack for communication entirely.
In an interview with an American publication, Slack’s CEO Stewart Butterfield expressed his faith in Slack to work for literally the largest organizations of the world.
IBM becomes Slack’s biggest customer after this rollout and it has been one of their biggest customers for quite some years now. With the initial rollout to only some employees, IBM took its time to fully agree on using Slack for all of its employees. There isn’t a concrete mention of what plans offered by Slack is the company using- paid or free. It could also be a mix of both kinds of plans for a different set of employees.
Slack and Microsoft Teams have been at loggerheads not only because of competition but also in open statements made by them. Microsoft had taken over Slack last year with 20 million active users as compared to Slack’s 12 million. Now, Slack becoming the choice for IBM is coming at a time when Microsoft Teams just began with TV advertisements.
Wow, I guess we will be seeing some very tough competitions in the future. Bringing the Slack to IBM is very great and smart thinking. Now the Microsoft team will have to think of something more and bigger. Thank you for the updates.