IBM just went all in on Slack

Slack now has all of IBM’s massive 350,000 person workforce on Slack’s business chat app.

According to Business Insider, “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.”

IBM is a massive company and massive companies can move very slowly especially when instituting a company wide change.

Even though this news came out today, IBM has been Slack’s biggest customer for years.

Business Insider went one to say “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.

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. It was late last year, however, that IBM decided to go all-in with Slack.”

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said 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.

Even though Slack has gained these new 350,000 users, Microsoft is still the leader in the business chat arena with an active user count of 20 million compared to Slack’s 12 million.

By Platform De.Central