Slack
Slack occupies the space that all other team collaboration apps want to be in: unmatched brand recognition, viral adoption among users, hockey stick growth figures, created and operated by a sexy unicorn. As of early this year, Slack counted about five million daily active users, with 1.5 million of them paying for their accounts. That's up from just over one million daily active users, and 300,000 paid subscriptions in mid-2015.
The main change at Slack -- which is certain to shake all other developers given Slack's role in the market -- is the introduction of its long-awaited enterprise plan. Enterprise Grid was perpetually on the horizon. In 2015, it was expected to launch by early 2016, and in 2016 it was expected to be available in 2017. It's meant to be the IT-friendly face of an app whose viral adoption among end users has long frustrated CIOs requiring more centralized control over communications and collaboration software. To this end Enterprise Grid secures data stored on Slack, meets various regulatory compliance requirements, and provides centralized billing.
Other new stuff in Slack includes:
Voice and video calling is now native, presumably based on technology from its acquisition of Screenhero. Slack still doesn't integrate with PBXs and cloud-based telephony services, as can its rivals of the UC vendor variety. But its users can now escalate text-based chat sessions to voice or video as needed.
