Some countries have only now begun to see a decline in the number of infected with the novel coronavirus. The rest of the world is still at a stand-still, and many of us have been in isolation for more than a month to reduce the spread of COVID-19. As time progresses, more and more people across the globe flock to tools like Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, and Slack to connect.
No longer are businesses the backbone of these previously enterprise-centric solutions. Today, the landscape is a lot more commercial, and the proof is in the pudding. According to several unified communications and collaboration companies, the industry’s experiencing serious upticks in usage because of the virus, and here’s what we found after chatting with a few of the biggest brands.
Microsoft’s had a significant increase in Microsoft Teams usage, seeing a new daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes, she told me. When you break it down, that’s an increase of 200 percent from 900 million in mid-March. This showcases a rise in demand for technology that both connects and fuels secure productivity,” Microsoft told us.
A Microsoft spokesperson told me, the company’s found a lot of new uses cases for Teams. The leader in collaboration’s seen a rise in education-related usage with 183,000 users in 175 countries taking to its popular Teams app for educational purposes. Microsoft said it plans to accommodate those using Microsoft Teams for education, last week announcing the addition of “Two new requested features” — an option to end meetings for meeting organizers, and the ability to download participant reports.
Teams’ total number of video calls grew in March by 1,000 percent. Countries like Norway and the Netherlands turn on video the most, with 60 percent of meetings held in these regions relying on video, according to Microsoft. The number of weekly Teams mobile users rose more than three times from early February to the end of March. And Microsoft saw its most notable increases in Teams mobile engagement in countries hit hardest by COVID-19, Italy and Spain in both the education and government sectors.
From March first until March 31, the average time between a person’s first use of Teams and their last use of Teams each day increased by over one hour. “Despite some employees returning to work, there is still more than two times the number of new Teams users each day in China compared to the end of January.” Microsoft’s seen a steady rise in the number of daily active Teams users in China, telling us, that number continues to grow week-over-week.
Collaboration software developer Cisco hosted almost the entire population of the United States on its Webex platform, reporting 324 million Webex users in March. Cisco said it saw close to 240,000 online sign-ups in 24 hours in March. And in one day alone, Cisco hosted over four million meetings.
“This is more than twice the average on a peak day before the pandemic”
In March Cisco accumulated a record 14 billion meeting minutes, more than double its figures in February.
Avaya is also experiencing some heavy traffic, telling me, since January the company’s seen a 2,100 percent increase in video collaboration traffic on the Avaya Spaces platform. And over the past month, Slack said its seen a 350 percent growth in calls made and received via Slack, including native Slack calls, BlueJeans, Webex, Zoom, and others.
