Slack Technologies Inc on Tuesday announced support of four new languages and a Shared Channels feature that allows employees of different companies to work together on the popular workplace communication software.<\/b>
\nSAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) — Slack Technologies Inc on Tuesday announced support of four new languages and a Shared Channels feature that allows employees of different companies to work together on the popular workplace communication software.
Slack is rolling out the product updates as competition mushrooms in the workplace messaging market, fueled in part by Slack\u2019s own success. Facebook Inc, Microsoft Corp, Alphabet Inc\u2019s Google, and Cisco Systems Inc are piling in with new offerings.
\u201cWe believe this is the most important thing we\u2019 ve done since launching Slack itself, \u201d April Underwood, Slack\u2019s vice president of product, said.
Privately held Slack now has more than 6 million daily active users and more than 2 million paid users, up from 5 million users and 1.5 million paid users in January. The two products are intended to drive Slack\u2019s user adoption around the globe.
Over half of Slack\u2019s users are based outside of the United States, Chief Executive Stewart Butterfield said, and the company hopes to see greater global growth by adding support for French, German, Spanish and Japanese.
The new Shared Channels feature allows users of Slack\u2019s Standard and Plus plans to create group chats with users from their company as well as those of another organization, such as a vendor or a major customer.
\u201cNo company is an island, \u201d Underwood said.
It is a theme that has mobilized Slack\u2019s competition too. Since launching last year, Facebook\u2019s Workplace product has allowed for external collaboration. Similarly, Microsoft\u2019s Teams product this week added a feature so that organizations can grant individual guest access to their team group chats.
\u201cShared Channels keeps Slack further ahead of other real-time chat providers who don\u2019 t make this nearly as simple, \u201d said Andy Pflaum, co-founder of Astro, a Palo Alto startup whose technology lets users read their email through Slack.
The team collaborative applications market grew 13.6 percent from 2015 to 2016 and is expected to be worth more than $22 billion by 2021, according to IDC, the marketing consulting firm.
IDC estimates that Slack generated $102 million in revenue in 2016, up 242 percent from 2015. Microsoft remains the leader in the space with 36.8 percent market share compared to Slack\u2019s 5.3 percent hold, according to IDC.
Butterfield says Slack\u2019s customer base grows any time a company starts to use the software.
\u201cOnce it spreads inside a company, there\u2019s a strong incentive for people to join, but there will be now a strong incentive for new companies to join, \u201d he said.
Shared Channels, however, are not yet supported for the enterprise version of Slack.
\u201cShared Channels is a great idea, but today\u2019s announcement is quite limited, \u201d said Alan Lepofsky, analyst with Constellation Research.<\/p>\n

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