"Going wall to wall in IBM - it's basically the maximum scale that there is, so we now know that Slack will work for literally the largest organizations in the world," Butterfield said. Scoring a deal of this magnitude will only add fuel to Slack's ambitions of attracting more and larger customers. That rivalry has made Wall Street nervous, with its stock now trading at around $22 - below its offering price of $26. Slack, for its part, is facing intense competitive pressure from Microsoft, which has made its rival Teams product a part of the Office 365 suite - and attracted 20 million users, more than the 12 million that Slack last shared in October. One of Rometty's biggest focuses was helping to make sure that the company stayed modern and relevant, both in terms of the products it offered, and in the experience of actually working there. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is stepping down, amid the company's difficult transition to the cloud computing era. News of the deal comes at a critical time for both companies.
"There still isn't anyone else who can support that many people in a system like this." "If we can create a channel for every project, every topic, every team, every customer, every office location, every business year, basically everything that's going on in the company, then it massively increases the transparency and alignment.Slack was a product that did that exceptionally well," Butterfield told Business Insider. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield boasts that the app stands to help IBM achieve its goals of working together more closely and more transparently, in a way that he believes competitors like Microsoft can't match. After Business Insider's report, Slack published an 8K filing with the SEC stating that the company was not updating its financial forecast as a result of the report, and noting that "IBM has been Slack's largest customer for several years and has expanded its usage of Slack over that time." Slack's stock surged as much as 15 percent on Monday following Business Insider's report about its expanded deal with IBM. It was late last year, however, that IBM decided to go all-in with Slack. It's the culmination of an IBM partnership with Slack that dates back to at least 2016: Big Blue had been using Slack in at least some teams for years now, and the two companies offer integrations between their products. Slack, one of Silicon Valley's biggest startup success stories in recent memory, to every single one of its 350,000 employees, expanding a longstanding relationship between the two companies. In the latest step, IBM has said that it will deploy workplace chat app Take, for example, IBM, which is undergoing a major internal modernization project to bring the 108-year-old tech titan up to speed with the latest and greatest ways to get work done.
You might think of the tech industry as always being the first to adopt new gadgets and software to use in their own work, but that's not always the case.Īfter all, big tech companies employ tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, giving their IT departments the same massive headaches when it comes to digital transformation as anybody else. Sign up here to receive updates on all things Innovation Inc.