Dive Brief:

• Slack and Oracle announced a partnership to integrate the communication platform into the legacy provider's enterprise software, reports Reuters. Employees in sales, human resources and corporate development will use the tool in Oracle's software.
• Oracle currently has 30,000 employees using Slack, and its chatbots are in development with plans of debuting in the next two quarters.
• The communication platform is a natural adoption for many software companies. It affords employees a natural way to converse and operates like the "next browser," said Suhas Uliyar, Oracle's vice president of bots, artificial intelligence and mobile.

Dive Insight:

The symbiotic relationship between software companies and communication platform companies is growing. Platforms like Slack are reliant on the established presence of enterprise software like Oracle's while software firms are responding to the rising demand of the messaging market.

Communication platforms are the hottest market to capitalize on, and companies like Google, Atlassian and Facebook have all joined in. Workplace by Facebook landed a 2.2 million employee customer, Walmart, in September.

Still, Microsoft's Teams dominates the market with its well-established enterprise presence from its SaaS, IaaS and HaaS offerings. Teams is used in about 125,000 organizations while Slack is in about 35,000. Both companies launched external collaboration tools, but Microsoft's cloud presence and number of Office 365 users will probably outperform Slack's "Shared Channels" tool.

Slack was one of the original successful communication platforms, and while its user base is not as large as Microsoft's, it is still seen as an innovator in the market.

Oracle is a competitor of Microsoft and also has legacy reputation in enterprise tech. The partnership will grant Slack entrance to more companies' communication network than it could do on its own.