Slack Marks Official Foray Into India, Bullish On Capturing The Workplace Communication Segment

Workplace messaging service Slack has made its official foray into India to strengthen its presence in the market. The company makes the move at a time when it believes that the Indian Inc has started moving towards a more hybrid work model.

Slack wants to position itself as a go-to-option for Indian organisations to establish ‘Digital HQ’. It wants to help Indian companies adopt a faster, flexible and work-from-anywhere approach by connecting their teams, tools, customers, and partners easily through the messaging service.

Stewart Butterfield, cofounder and CEO of Slack is of the view that it is very difficult now to go back to the physical workplace entirely as people have tasted flexibility. According to Butterfield, the overall dependency on synchronous work is inefficient. 

“Slack’s mission is to make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive,” Butterfield commented during the launch event.

Slack Aims To Capitalise On India’s Flexibility Seeking Workforce

Considerably, ‘The Reinvention of Work’, a study conducted by Slack with more than 2,000 Indian knowledge workers, found 4 in 5 respondents had a desire for flexibility. In addition, 80% of them would seek a role elsewhere if their employer doesn’t accommodate this. Realising the pulse of the Indian workforce, Slack is trying to build on its presence among the flexibility-seeking workforce.

The communication service established its product engineering team in Pune in 2018 following the company’s acquisition of Astro. Since then, India has emerged as one of the important markets for the company.

While Slack works in a freemium model in the country, the Indian market has one of the largest free user bases for Slack and is positioned in its top 10 markets for paid teams globally. Currently, Slack has more than 120 employees across four offices in Pune, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Gurugram.

In its client portfolio, Slack has many prominent startups such as Zomato, Dreamsports, Freecharge, Razorpay, Meesho. Moreover, some of Slacks’ global customers such as IBM, Oracle, Amazon, and Intuit have their presence in India, which helps the messaging service to get traction in the region. 

The company believes it is in a sweet spot in the Indian market thanks to the low barrier of entry and usability of the product. 

Last year, cloud computing company Salesforce acquired Slack in a $27.7 Bn dollar deal. While Salesforce has had a presence in India since 2005 and has over 6,500 employees across Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, Slack is also utilising the parent company’s footprint for its outreach in India.

However, it might face stiff competition from WhatsApp as it is gearing up to launch a new product called communities. It will allow users to put different groups under a single organisation. WhatsApp’s entry into community tools becomes more important for the Indian market as it has over 487 Mn users in India, according to a Statista report.