Dive Brief:
- Microsoft’s Office 365 productivity suite is the most popular Web-based business application, according to a report released Tuesday by Okta, a San Francisco-based startup, which provides a service to help companies manage access to their cloud applications.
- Office 365 was followed by Salesforce.com, Box and Google Apps. Amazon Web Services also joined the ranks of the top five most used Web business apps, up from the number eight slot last year.
- Office 365 made its way to the top of the most-used app list among its customers in the middle of 2015, the report said.
Dive Insight:
Competition has been hot in the cloud-based workplace productivity area as more businesses have moved away from out-of-the-box workplace productivity software to Web-based tools. Competition between Microsoft's Office 365 and Google for Work, in particular, has been fierce in recent months, with both companies offering a number of new incentives and collaborations to attract more businesses.
Microsoft was heavily used in the financial, biotech, construction, healthcare and IT sectors, according to Okta's analysis. Google, however, was more prevalent in the marketing, advertising, education and software industries, along with Internet companies.
Okta analyzed the usage of more than 4,000 applications across more than 2,500 of its customers.
The fastest-growing app in Okta’s data was cloud-based collaboration app Slack, which grew by 77% during the second half of 2015. Business analytics software provider Tableau was the second-fastest and software analytics company New Relic was third, growing 65% and 56%, respectively.
