‘We Would be Dumb to Go Back to the Old Way of Working’

Slack’s VP EMEA opens up about the changed competitive landscape and the Salesforce acquisition

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Johann Butting
Unified CommunicationsLatest News

Published: May 4, 2021

Marian McHugh

Technology Reporter

The hybrid work model is here to stay and organisations should ensure they are equipped for this permanent change, according to Slack’s VP EMEA, Johann Butting.

Butting used his own experience to illustrate how the way we work has been changed irrevocably by the pandemic. Pre-pandemic, he was used to boarding multiple flights a week to meet customers and colleagues all over EMEA. Lockdown restrictions across the region meant he then had to do most of his business over collaboration platforms, which has led to increased productivity and a closer relationship between him and his customers.

“Everyone thought, ‘Now we can’t travel, we’re not going to see customers anymore’ – but the opposite has happened,” he explained to UC Today.

“Organisations have become much more used to having conversations via video conferencing tools and tools like Slack. I am connecting with customers way more than I used to and that’s because behaviour patterns have changed. The number of CIOs that I have a shared channel with now in Slack has exploded and has really driven a massive difference in how I communicate with our customers.

“This is here to stay because there is such an increase in efficiency for me and my customers that we would just be dumb to go back to the old way of working. Now I wonder why we didn’t do this years ago; we just needed the extra push from the pandemic to prove that this is possible.”

Established in 2009, Slack is often considered the pioneer for messaging and collaboration platforms. However, over the course of the past year there has been an explosion in UC and collaboration technologies, notably Zoom and Microsoft Teams, which boasted this week that it now has 145 million daily active users.

Butting acknowledged this rapid change in the UC landscape and singled out Teams as its biggest competitor in the market right now. He praised Microsoft’s strategy as “smart” by incorporating its apps into the Teams platform to keep users in its walled garden. However, he said that Teams and Slack are catering to very different needs in the industry.

“We are building Slack such that all the software tools you use in your daily work are integrated into our platform – Microsoft wouldn’t want to do that because they only want to integrate their own tools and a few others that they absolutely can’t do without,” he stated.

“While both [Slack and Teams] are fundamentally messaging tools that are used in the enterprise, they are serving two very different purposes. Of our big enterprise customers, over two thirds of them happily use Slack in connection with Microsoft Teams, so they’re very clearly recognising those tools are serving very different purposes.”

How Salesforce Acquisition Will Help Partners

CRM giant Salesforce raised eyebrows last December when it announced its intention to acquire Slack for $27.7bn.

Butting said he didn’t find the acquisition surprising at all, rather he thought it made “a lot” of sense and will boost Slack’s partner channel.

“Slack’s partner ecosystem is relatively undeveloped, certainly compared to more established industry players,” he acknowledged.

“When you compare that to Salesforce, they obviously have a strong system integrators network. We are increasingly seeing that a lot of our customers really feel they need to introduce a culture change in their organisation and I think a lot of those consulting and system integration partners can really help with that. From that perspective, there is really a significant opportunity here for our partner ecosystem.”

 

 

CRMMergers and AcquisitionsMicrosoft Teams
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