Dive Brief:
- After three years on the market, Workplace by Facebook has 3 million monthly paying customers, according to the company.
- The announcement comes as the company added Workplace on Portal, an application for video and voice calls through Facebook's Portal. Other new video-related tools include automatic video captioning, and faster peer-to-peer broadcasting where videos are distributed "across viewers, instead of each individual getting their own stream," according to the announcement.
- With an eye toward gaining enterprise customers, Workplace added training curation options for administrators and the ability to send surveys over Workplace Chat. It also allows front-line employees access when they do not have a corporate email account.
Dive Insight:
Workplace, while lacking the market-staple reputation of Slack and accessibility of Microsoft Teams, has an impressive list of customers. Walmart picked up the platform a year after its debut. Other enterprise-level customers include Nestle, World Wildlife Fund, Spotify and GlaxoSmithKline plc.
In February, the collaboration platform had 2 million paying users and has since added Petco, Kering and Prada to its customer base. A month later, Microsoft announced it had 500,000 paying customers, overshadowing Slack's 85,000 paying customers. However, Teams has more than 13 million active daily users and Slack has 10 million.
"[We know] that enterprises especially feel this friction given their scale, size, and often disparate workforce. If you look at the landscape you’ll quickly notice that other organizations built their SaaS business in a uniform way," said Karandeep Anand, VP and head of Workplace by Facebook, in an email to CIO Dive.
Because of this, Workplace built its platform around the enterprise.
Slack found its early momentum in smaller businesses and teams. While Microsoft has an edge and ease of access with its Office suite, Workplace offers familiarity for employees. Facebook is likely a part of their personal lives.
Slack made its public debut riding on the expectation it would garner further enterprise customers, a place Microsoft Teams is comfortable in while adding in-demand tools for the enterprise.
Similar to Slack, Workplace positions itself as a neutral, niche platform for the communication space, whereas Microsoft has tools for nearly everything. SaaS integrations and "the resources Facebook has afforded Workplace," the platform is able to attract more customers, according to Anand.
Still, Workplace's parent company, Facebook, has billions of users, "all of Workplace's integrations have been subjected to an external, independent security audit as well to meet our high internal standards."
