Dive Brief:
- Facebook's communication platform, Workplace, took on one of its largest clients yet: mega-retailer Walmart, according to a company announcement. Workplace now services about 14,000 businesses including Starbucks and Telenor, reports TechCrunch.
- Workplace will be introduced gradually to employees of the different branches of the Walmart brand, beginning with Sam's Club. The company's 2.2 million employees are based across North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia.
- The retailer intends to use the communication platform for sharing photos of product displays, live video streams and centralized communication for remote or international locations, according to the report.
Dive Insight:
Adding Walmart to its clientele is no small feat for Workplace. At one time Walmart Labs used Slack and helped facilitate the acquisition of Jet.com, according to TechCrunch. It is unclear if Walmart is still using other communication platforms.
Facebook acquiring such a massive customer will be sure to shake the rest of the communication platform market, which major tech companies are lately staking claim in. Top providers include Slack, Microsoft's Teams, Google's Hangouts and Atlassian's HipChat. Slack dominated the enterprise communication platform since its release in 2014 and is used in more than 35,000 companies.
Microsoft's Teams joined the competition in November 2016 — one month after the launch of Workplace — and has been implemented in about 125,000 companies, threatening Slack's standing. Microsoft's success goes hand-in-hand with its all-in-one approach to enterprise software, hardware and services.
Walmart is looking to become more technologically adept in an attempt to remain dominant against competitors like Amazon.
Most companies are looking to centralized communication services to streamline workloads and collaboration. As the need for these platforms grows, platform features do too. New features such as Slack's "Shared Channels" and Teams' similar guest access portal are ways to attract companies using off premise collaboration.
