Today Microsoft announced some very positive user figures for Teams, one of the company’s fastest-growing products ever.
Since launching back on March 14th, 2017 Teams has gone from strength to strength and just over 2 years, has amassed 13 million daily active users (DAU). There are more than 19 million users on a weekly basis.
As further evidence of the success of Teams, it is now used by 93% of fortune 100 companies. There are now more than 160 organisations globally with more than 10,000+ users using it. One of the biggest professional services companies, Accenture with more than 200,000 employees are using it (in 2018 the company had 459,000 employees total).
Microsoft also promotes the fact large companies like Emirates, FedEx, Lexmark, The Adecco Group, KONE, and McCann Worldgroup are all using Teams.
By way of comparison, the biggest competitor, Slack began in February of 2014 and had steady growth to 10 Million users in Jan this year.
Redmond clearly has a massive hit on their hands with Microsoft Teams and shows no sign of slowing down. Teams is very different than most other software that Microsoft makes, available only as a cloud-only solution, most other software is also available (for now) in an on-prem version).
Part of the sell to users of Software as a service (SaaS) is that they’ll get the newest features first and faster than legacy distribution and deployment methods. Teams is perhaps the best realisation of that promise to date, with Microsoft’s development team releasing great new features each and every month since its launch.
When Teams was first launched, the development job was fairly easy to outline, they needed to reach feature parity with Skype for Business. Now they’ve basically reached that milestone (for the most part), the integrations, platform support (almost every platform supports teams) and responding to user feedback is really seeing the product go from strength to strength.
- What’s New in Microsoft Teams | April 2019
- What’s New in Microsoft Teams | May 2019
- What’s New in Microsoft Teams | June 2019
Microsoft has created a great product cycle with teams. The more features they add, the more incentive there is for new companies to implement Teams. This increased adoption provides more revenue and therefore funds new feature development.
While companies pay for Teams, especially those who want to go beyond IM, channels and PC-to-PC conferencing, Teams calling plans to mobiles and landlines (via Telstra in Australia) come at an additional cost to the base Teams licence.
In terms of the rapid uptick in daily active users, the free tier of Teams introduced July last year, certainly helped with that.
The last piece of the puzzle to make a great messaging, calling, presence platform is the hardware devices that integrate with Teams. This is where Microsoft leverage its long-standing partner network to deliver hardware that service vast business needs. These Teams devices include everything from headsets to speakerphones, desk phones, room systems, conference phones and video cameras.
Microsoft themselves are in the process of migrating their 220k+ employees to Microsoft Teams from Skype for Business, which now has a dubious future. When Teams first launched, the product crossover with Skype was interesting, now its a roadmap to the end of Skype for Business. If your business is currently running it, it’s time to start planning a migration away.
More information at Microsoft 365 blog.
