Microsoft set to rule the world of collaborative chat apps

According to new research from Spiceworks, which took in the opinions of some 450 IT professionals in North America and EMEA regarding collaborative chat apps, Microsoft will do very well with its incoming Teams product (built along the lines of Slack), and the firm is set to become kingpin when it comes to messaging platforms in the work environment.

While Microsoft Teams is only used by 3% of businesses right now (although that percentage increases to 7% when talking about larger firms of 500+ employees), it’s expected to grow considerably within the next two years, with 17% of organisations planning to adopt the system.

That means in total, within two years, Teams will be used by 20% of organisations (with the majority of that adoption coming in the first year), which will mean it overtakes both Google Hangouts and Slack, which Spiceworks estimates will be on 19% and 17% respectively.

Captain of chat

In other words, Microsoft Teams will be the second most-used messaging platform, behind only Skype for Business which will be deployed by 47% of firms in two years’ time (and is already used by 36% of businesses). Of course, that’s a Microsoft product too, leaving the firm pretty dominant when it comes to collaborative chat in the workplace.

As for Workplace by Facebook, another obvious big name in this arena, it is currently only being used by 1% of smaller firms, and 2% of larger (500+) companies. According to Spiceworks, 82% of the professionals surveyed said they had no plans to deploy this platform at their organisation.

Perhaps that’s because when it came to ranking chat apps across various different categories, Workplace by Facebook was the second lowest ranking product in terms of security, reliability and cost-effectiveness (only beating Hipchat, which was bottom in all these categories).

Other interesting nuggets the research turned up include the fact that 47% of the EMEA IT pros indicated that they believed collaborative chat apps were critical to the success of their business.

And when it came to security, respondents weren’t too concerned, as only 32% believed that messaging apps put business data at more risk, and 29% said that these messaging platforms represent a security risk which is ‘difficult to manage’.

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