Software company AvePoint just raised $200 million to, in part, help Slack customers migrate to Microsoft’s Teams app, according to Business Insider and the company’s press release.
Slack has been facing increased competition from Teams, with Microsoft’s app recently doubling Slack’s user base. One of the biggest factors driving Teams’ growth has been its integration with Microsoft’s other apps and cloud solutions, such as Office 365.
As a Microsoft Global ISV Partner, AvePoint specializes in helping companies “migrate, manage, and protect their cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.” Armed with the latest funding, AvePoint is planning to “accelerate its growth and investment into its channel offerings that provide managed service providers (MSPs) the tools to better migrate, manage and protect the Office 365 environments of their small and medium business clients. AvePoint aims to add more than 40,000 customers through the channel in the next two years.”
A big part of this will be helping Slack customers migrate to Microsoft’s app. AvePoint is currently “the only scaled vendor that provides Microsoft Teams backup solutions as well as Slack to Teams migration solutions and services.”
Slack has maintained that its users are more engaged than users of Teams or other platforms. At the same time, Slack has also been accused of being too busy and overloading its users with notifications. With the one company who can help users migrate from Slack to Teams investing even more in that endeavor, Slack will need to continue to innovate to stay in the game.