In Crowded Collaboration Market, Facebook Workplace Finds New Friend in Walmart

Facebook has just signed a significant customer to Workplace, its business collaboration service that competes with Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Walmart is using Workplace across its international teams to help associates communicate and manage projects, according to an announcement today. While it is unclear how many of Walmart’s employees are using Workplace, the company has more than 2.3 million associates around the world.

Walmart management is already using Workplace features like Live to connect with associates and share updates, and associates post pictures of in-store product displays to share best practices. Translation features on Workplace have facilitated better collaboration among associates in multiple geographies, Facebook said.

“Our associates have been able to build connections and collaborate better on Workplace because it just works. We love it,” Walmart EVP and CIO Clay Johnson said in a statement.

One of the biggest things Workplace has going for it, at least when it comes to user experience, is the familiarity most users have with Facebook’s platform. This means that companies can spend less time training, and employees may be more likely to use it since it is something they already have experience with.

"The familiar Facebook platform is redesigned for business, providing collaboration with documents, files, chat, and video,” IDC Research Director for Social and Experiential Solution, Wayne Kurtzman said. “Popular integrations, including for governance, eDiscovery, and Bots, make Facebook Workplace a strong contender in the team collaborative and chat applications markets."

According to Facebook, Workplace has added more than 14,000 companies over the past 10 months. It is used in 77 countries, and its customers include Booking.com, HelloFresh, and Starbucks.

Slack recently added several languages to help better serve its customers across more than 100 countries.

This week at Ignite, Microsoft detailed its investments in Microsoft Teams, including making it the core communications client in Office 365, replacing the current Skype for Business client in Office 365 over time.

A few months ago Walmart told its partners and suppliers to avoid AWS as it is weary of putting sensitive data on a competitor’s servers. This competition could heat up even more if Amazon actually went through with its acquisition of Slack, which was rumored in June.