Microsoft Teams leads the way in team collaboration

At the start of this year Microsoft announced it had 120 million subscribed Office applications users. Of these, Microsoft expects 70% to migrate onto Office 365 and Teams collaboration in 2019. This contrasts with Slack which despite the media hype announced in May it has 8 million active users. Slack and a myriad of other collaboration systems have been around for some time now whereas Teams is the new kid on the block with a lot of growing to do. 

Nemertes, a global research advisory, conducted their 2018-19 team collaboration study which involved more than 600 companies and found that less than 28% were using a team collaboration tool. From that study the chart below depicts current market breakdown with Microsoft Teams taking the lead at nearly 33% from Cisco Sparks 21%:

Image: Courtesy of Nemertes

Teams is not simply the new team messaging and collaboration tool, it's a new way of working that is aligned to the modern ways in which people naturally interact with one another. It's part of the O365 stack of services which are offered bundled with the single user license model that provides the other workspace apps and services; Outlook, Excel, OneDrive etc. Teams bubbles up that workspace information bringing context but can do so much more.

Many of those 120 million Office users will transition their workspace applications to Office 365 and use Teams, not because it's a better collaboration tool but because it's effectively free for them. Within my customer base the intent for transitioning to Teams as both a collaboration tool and communication system is significantly high. Smaller organisations migrating to Office 365 (<500 seats) will not be offered Skype for Business, Teams is the only UC client the will receive now.

With Microsoft integrating into Teams the services Skype for Business online delivers including PSTN calling, audio conferencing and Teams agents for 3rd party contact centres, it will offer functionality far beyond the competition enabling more of those existing 120 million Office users to adopt Teams as their single communication and team collaboration platform. When we check back in a year from now I wonder how much of that pie chart will have turned green.