Slack Files IPO, Boosts Security, Partners with Zoom

… the superior messaging platform.

“Slack is a great SMB solution for organizations that are not yet thinking deeply about enterprise information management, in which video plays an increasingly important role,” Buckley said.

The security improvements were necessary, he added.

“I don’t look at their security announcements as a leg up, but as catch up to where they needed to be,” Buckley said.

A Different Partner Model

While Slack considers itself a partner-focused company, it has a different approach than Microsoft. Slack’s key partners are ISVs across various categories such as bots, analytics, customer support, health, HR, marketing, finance, productivity, project management, sales, security, voice and video, among others. Key partners include Atlassian, Box, Google, Oracle SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Workday and Zendesk.

Brad Armstrong, Slack’s head of corporate and business development told attendees at the Frontier conference that there are 1,500 apps in its directory; 94% of teams use selected apps and each week 450,000 apps in aggregate are used. Most recently, Oracle announced a series of Slack integrations with its customer experience apps. Slack also announced a new portfolio of Salesforce apps and its Workday apps, set for release this fall, are in private beta.

Slack’s Brad Armstrong

“Every product integration is a partnership,” Armstrong said. “And every partnership is at its core, a collaboration between two companies, we run all of our partnerships on Slack. We’re committed to growing this ecosystem so that our customers continue to have choice in all the apps they use at Slack.”

Slack announced its latest partnership with conferencing provider Zoom. Since adding Zoom integration into Slack last year, 10,000 Zoom teams now use it, according to Armstrong.

“We’re doubling down on the integration and we’re going deeper with a true partnership,” he said. Users can now launch a Zoom meeting from a Slack notification.

The two companies are now building the ability to preview a meeting before it starts with the ability to receive real-time updates during a meeting. Also planned in the coming months is integration with Zoom Phone, allowing users to make a call from their Slack user profiles over cellular or Wi-Fi networks.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield (left) and Zoom CEO Eric Yuan.

On the heels of its IPO last week, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan joined Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield on stage Thursday. Discussing various use cases, they see the Zoom Phone integration as a compelling feature.

“That threshold of convenience really makes an experiential difference,” Butterfield said.

“Partnering with Zoom is the smartest thing they’ve done as of late as video takes over, and the need to meet now, via one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many via video is where comms are going,” CollabTalk’s Buckley said. “But even with a stellar relationship with Zoom, they’re still playing catch-up with what Teams has going for it: the dominant SharePoint and Exchange workloads on the back end with their extensive auditing, compliance, security and governance capabilities.”