Dive Brief:

• Workplace by Facebook unveiled more than 50 Software as a Service offerings including Atlassian, HubSpot, Cisco Webex and Microsoft SharePoint during Facebook's annual conference for developers in San Jose, Calif., reports VentureBeat. 

• The communication platform's new integrations will allow users to summon an available enterprise software in company groups or conversations on Work Chat, according to the report. This enables users to send updates or evaluate how a campaign on SurveyMonkey is doing, for example. Additionally, a bot provided by ADP is available to answer employee inquiries about paychecks.

• Virgin Atlantic uses a similar, custom bot through a Workplace integration to aid employees in finding available seats on aircrafts to use their employee discount, according to a Workplace announcement. Virgin employees are entitled to discounted rates on flights, but only when seats are available. To eliminate the frustration of manual searching, the airline turned to Load Checker, which uses a Workplace Chatbot to automate the search.

Dive Insight:

Just like any service in the tech industry, collaborative integrations are needed for survival. Few companies rely on just one provider so having easy access to services is becoming an unavoidable requirement for IT departments.

The communication platform market is saturated with companies striving to be the tool that allows seamless integration to other services. For example, both Google Chats and Microsoft have intercompany collaboration offerings through G Suite and the Azure Active Directory. Slack and Oracle partnered in October to integrate Slack's communication service into Oracle's legacy enterprise software.

Workplace will turn two years old in October and in such a small amount of time has become a force to watch in the market. It is already used by some high-profile customers like Virgin Atlantic, Walmart, Spotify and Starbucks, among some 30,000 other organizations.

A communication provider that allows ease of access to other vital enterprise services is sure to have an upper hand in the market. Though Microsoft can still tout itself as a one-stop-shop for many services, integrations such as this will require more diverse service provider collaborations.