Slack Connect has seen “exceptional growth” since its offical launch last year, CEO Stuart Butterfield revealed in his keynote presentation at Slack Frontiers’ EMEA Summit.
Billed as a replacement for email, Slack Connect is a secure communications platform, located within Slack Channels that enables up to 20 partners – external and internal – to collaborate, react to messages and share documents.
Slack released UK growth stats in tandem with the Frontiers event. For the UK market, revenue grew 31 percent year-on-year for its FY21, while paying customers rocketed 94 percent.
Butterfield also revealed that 74,000 organisations are now using Connect, an increase of over 100 percent year-on-year and that the number of connected endpoints jumped 245 percent year-on-year.
“The reaction to Connect has been pretty incredible,” he told attendees of the virtual event.
“People are finding it so much easier to support customers using a shared channel. We are finding that people on the sell-side – people who sell software, other services, a lot of the world’s biggest consulting organisations, a lot of the world’s biggest purchasers – are on it because they want to receive that level of responsiveness and support. Its been entirely driven by customers coming up with new use cases.
“This was part of the vision of Slack from the very beginning and it took us years to get to this point, but now that it’s happening, it’s everything that we dreamed it would be.”
Slack’s New Innovations
The vendor revealed that the number of apps built by developers for the Slack platform increased by 37 percent year-on-year since January 2020, while the number of custom apps built by customers for the Slack platform increasing by 51 percent, representing the largest increase in Europe.
Elsewhere in the presentation, Butterfield spoke of the future of work and how organisations should use the lessons learned from remote working this past year to ensure the same level of efficiency is retained when employees return to the office.
“If you ask managers or leaders ‘could your company improve the overall efficacy and productivity of its meetings by 20 percent?’ almost everyone would say yes,” he stated.
“If the majority of your employees are spending most of their day in meetings, why are you doing that? Why are people spending half of their time on basic acts of communication and coordination – like updating the status report to review – not on interesting, creative, strategic brainstorm conversations? I do think those [basic acts] are critically important because that’s how you stay aligned and able to accomplish things with a large group of people – but it is a tremendous amount of effort.
“When you start to move to a digital-first approach, it’s an opportunity to re-examine the ways that you’re working and see which ones serve you and which ones don’t and what things you’d like to change in the future.”
As part of the lessons Slack has learned over the course of the past 15 months, Butterfield elaborated on some of the product innovations it has seen developed to combat the limitations of remote working.
Huddles – which is currently being tested with customers – is an always-on audio channel intended to recreate the spontaneity of in-person conversations between small teams.
“You can just enter the huddle by yourself and have your speakers on and be working away and if someone else joins in and say something you’ll hear them like you would overhear someone at your desk,” he explained.
“It’s not intended for huge groups of a thousand people, it’s for the people that you work with most closely on a team level. This ability to have the conversation right now turns out to be super valuable because the alternative is [arranging a meeting time that suits everyone].”
The other product it has been developing doesn’t have a name yet but is intended to be a “container” for asynchronous meetings, similar to Instagram or Snapchat stories, Butterfield said. It allows users to attach a presentation, planning materials, the agenda or planning documents that it allows people to attend it in their own time.
“The biggest advantage is that it gives people some flexibility. Any process today that you can make asynchronous – even if it doesn’t reduce the total number of hours worked – is still enormously valuable to people because some people like to work early in the morning and some people would rather work in the evening,” he said.
“It helps people in multiple time zones and it also helps people who like to take a little bit more time to formulate their thoughts before giving feedback.”
