Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Skype, Snapchat. In 2018, the consumer is well and truly connected. Social Media Week suggest that millennials check their phone 157 times a day. The importance of staying connected in the consumer world is widely recognised and must be replicated in the business world to avoid falling behind the competition.
The culture of the connected world has opened the door to software houses and start-ups galore, each with their own interpretation of best practice for most effectively keeping up to date.
The connected world has empowered the enterprise to communicate and collaborate more effectively than ever. Real time and non-real time communications are joined up through all sorts of applications, and the laborious tasks of yesteryear are no more. Zipped folders, emails delayed due to file size and running out of storage space just don’t happen in the enterprise anymore.
When it comes to companies in this arena that have executed their strategy better than others, and perhaps had a better product than everyone else, nobody stands out more than Slack.
Slack for Teams
Acutely named to include their biggest competitor, Slack for Teams describes itself as a single workspace for your small- to medium-sized business (SMB) or team. However, the popularity gained through success stories and the clear productivity gains has escalated considerably. A Reuters report confirmed that Slack has recently added Target, BBC, Liberty Mutual Group, Workday and E*TRADE to its list of customers. Slack are no longer just dealing in the SMB market.
More recently Slack confirmed their Enterprise Grid platform for Enterprise businesses now has brands such as CapitalOne, 20th Century Fox, Liberty Mutual using it.
Scalability
Success stories like Slack gain momentum overnight and steamroll through businesses. Once an enterprise CIO gets word of a fancy new tool that everybody is talking about, the first question they should ask is, “is it scalable?” It’s no good investing in a tool that works great in a 100-user company if your company is 1,000 users and it just doesn’t work. All you have is 1,000 staff members using a new client in different ways or 100 people in one team using something new and the rest of the organisation feeling left out with legacy tech.
With the added logos, Slack are now clearly playing in the enterprise market. The likes of BBC and Liberty Mutual Group don’t take gambles on immature platforms that an intern has recommended. They operate vigorous procurement processes to realise the greatest addition to their business. The addition of Slack to the product inventory to these enterprises speaks volumes for the progress of Slack. Not bad for an internal tool developed for use in a small office in San Francisco.
Get the basics, and get more done
Slack comes in three flavours of licencing. Free, Standard and Plus. On Slack’s pricing page, the quote “Get the basics and get more done” appears. This is appealing to every SMB. The basic – and free - licence of the most popular, fastest growing collaboration platform should be a no-brainer for the SMB.
The cost-free addition of 10,000 searchable messages across various channels, built in third party integrations and voice and video calls can only enhance the communication and collaboration experience within an SMB. Throw in included support and 5GB storage and it’s hard to see why any SMB would turn down, at least, a free trial.
Enterprise Appeal
The free licence offers a great deal to the SMB at no cost. Naturally, however, the enterprise demands more. Slack seems to have this covered. 10,000 searchable messages simply aren’t enough to scale in the enterprise, so the Standard and Plus messages are upped to unlimited – we are dealing with cloud storage after all.
Typically, an enterprise user is dealing with multiple third parties. For example, a project manager working on three projects could have interactions with those three customers, six suppliers, a consultancy firm, the in-house support function and all sorts of third parties involved in the project. Guest access becomes critical for the enterprise here. The ability to exchange information and documentation in one secure place is vital for enterprise projects and teams.
Ultimately, Slack are knocking on the door of enterprise UC&C and causing the biggest vendors a headache. You don’t need to look further than Cisco and 
