Slack, the business communication and transfer service, has experienced a high rise in popularity for its demographic, despite being launched just three years ago. The service has around 5 million daily users, with around 1.5 million being paid subscribers. Now, the company set its eyes on the big fish of the industry, enterprises.
Slack was mainly designed and used by small and medium business, but as the company grows and refines its service, it’s also seeking to expand beyond its traditional user base. The company will try to garner the attention of enterprises, those companies of up to 500,000 employees.
For this purpose, Slack has announced that it has launched its Enterprise Grid tools suite. Having been in development for over a year, the new service does not only offer an enterprise-grade version of their current apps and tools, but it will also come with a series of new features.
Among the new Enterprise Grid features, the most notable are the business analytics and intelligence tools, a new type of search which will allow users to search for files across the entire system. It will also suggest content and various contacts to users in order to promote interaction across the various levels of a company. Unfortunately, these features are not yet available and will roll out to all enterprise users later this year.
With the launch of the Enterprise Grid suite of tools, Slack has also announced some of its initial customers which include financial services like Paypal, IBM, and Capital One. It is somewhat unusual to see IBM as a client considering that it has its own collaboration product for enterprises, IBM connections while working on an AI business intelligence product known as Watson Workspace.
The Enterprise Grid includes several other features like IT admins being able to manage and provision more teams, new layers of security and identity management, compliance controls and data loss prevention features.
Despite the launch of Enterprise Grid, Slack has not revealed the pricing for its new service. Interested companies will have to apply directly to Slack. However, it’s worth remembering that its initial service costs between $8 to $15 per month and included two different tiers.
Image credit: Slack