IBM is going all-in on Slack as it modernizes its IT - Business Insider

You might think of the tech industry as being always being the first to adopt new gadgets and software to use in their own work, but that's not always the case.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield boasts that the app stands to help IBM achieve its goals of working together more closely and more transparently, in a way that he believes competitors like Microsoft can't match. Scoring a deal of this magnitude will only add fuel to Slack's ambitions of attracting more and larger customers.

It didn't take long before the trend came to the notice of IBM's Toolkit team, the organization under the chief information officer that chooses the software to which employees have access. In 2015, Konrad Lagard, director of IBM Toolkit, started talking to a 68-person engineering team, and found himself struck with how much they liked it.

So the ultimate decision to officially standardize the whole company on Slack was something of a no-brainer, Lagard says. IBM employees liked Slack, and were already using Slack, so the Toolkit team saw no need to mess with success when it came time to think about moving the entire company to one service, Lagard said.

"IBM has hit the limitations of more or less every part of Slack at some point, whether that's performance of the backend of desktop software or mobile software, the administrative tools, and everything else," Butterfield said. On the flipside, Butterfield says that IBM's participation helped teach Slack how to better appeal to larger customers, rather than the startup and small businesses that had been the company's original target demographic.

Wait till they face the usual stability issues and when critical business processes are failing because Slack decided not to deliver notifications for some inexplicable reason while the support only tells you 'no problem on our side'.

What an easy deal for Slack. They sure weren’t using their competition.

mplsgilyard Someone needs to print this out and get it to LizFedor because this is the kind of tech news that she needs.

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