According to Slack’s CEO, Stewart Butterfield (pictured, above), the collaboration company is working on a Microsoft Teams calling integration for the chat app. On a call with analysts, Butterfield told CNBC “We’re working on Teams integrations for calling.” In a statement to UC Today, Slack said: “We’ll be able to provide more details soon.” Tom Hadfield, CEO of Mio, a messaging interoperability solutions provider, commented on the integration, telling me:
“The future of intercompany collaboration relies on full interoperability between Slack and Microsoft Teams. Cross-platform calling is a good start, but our customers tell us what they really need is cross-platform shared channels and direct messaging”
A Slack spokesperson also said the company is using Microsoft’s available APIs to create the new calling feature, but not much else is known. The new feature is, yet, poised to bridge the gap between two of the world’s top collaborations tools. And the move makes sense, given the fact that during a recent earnings call, Slack said most of its $1 million and above customers use Microsoft Office 365, and they gain access to Teams at no extra cost.
This figure could extend the reach of Teams even further, putting it ahead of Slack by larger margins if the majority of the 200 million Office 365 users decide to deploy Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams recently announced that it had 44 million daily active users, while Slack’s latest figures come from October 2019, when the company said it had 12 million daily active users.
Last year Slack launched Outlook calendar, email, and OneDrive integrations using Microsoft APIs. Microsoft Teams, much like Slack, has voice and video calling within the platform, and Slack users can already start voice as well as video calls from within Slack via Skype. Skype, also owned by Microsoft, is seeing a lot of traction during this period, too. With one hundred million users, according to Microsoft, the company says its seen a 220 percent increase in Skype-to-Skype calls.
Earlier this week, Microsoft said it would launch a new consumer-facing version of its Teams collaboration software. The app is set to launch later this year, and the new customer-centric Microsoft Teams will enable families and small groups to organize events, share information, as well as host video chats.
Last month Slack released its most sweeping set of updates in the form of a platform redesign. The redesign of Slack offers a cleaner navigation experience of the app’s user interface, which has long been a criticism of the collaboration app. Slack also said it would roll out a new mobile version of its app.
In February Slack outfitted the rest of IBM’s employees with the collaboration software, adding 50,000 more seats to its platform, bringing the total number of IBM employees using Slack to 350,000. Both Slack and Microsoft have seen an uptick in usage and the novel coronavirus is more or less to blame. Today, 1st April, at 12 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. (GMT+1), Slack’s CEO will address Enterprise Connect’s virtual audience, a conference that’s normally held in person. Butterfield is expected to give more insight into the new Teams calling feature.
