Slack growth has been phenomenal.
It has been so amazing in-fact, it forced Microsoft to change its strategy (again). The company’s UC solution went from LCS to OCS, Lync, Skype for Business and then finally, Teams – thanks to Slack. Likewise for Cisco – Teams, it is!
But to Cisco’s credit they were WAY ahead of the game with Quad – it just didn’t take off the way they hoped and we expected.
Based on a Mio survey, we wrote earlier today that Slack will continue to grow and take share from the rest of the market.
This hasn’t escaped the notice of VC Y Combinator who is leading a $50M series B investment into Slack’s open-source competitor, Mattermost. In addition, Ali Rowghani, CEO of Y Combinator Continuity, has joined the Mattermost Board of Directors.
Mattermost’s mission is to make the world safer and more productive by developing and delivering secure, open source collaboration software that is trusted, flexible and offers fast time-to-value. Mattermost’s first product is a collaboration platform built to accelerate DevOps workflows in high-trust environments by offering secure messaging collaboration across web, desktop, and native mobile devices.
The move here is not unlike what Digium did with Asterisk – launched an open-source phone system. Interestingly, about nine years ago, Digium CEO Danny Windham was keynoting at Asterisk World which was collocated at ITEXPO and mentioned open-source as part of the reason for Nortel’s Bankruptcy.
None of this is lost on YC as Mattermost has become their largest ever Series B investment, and largest open-source investment to date. “This is YC’s largest investment in an open source company. We believe that open source will drive innovation in enterprise messaging and collaboration just as it has for the infrastructure stack that powers many of the world’s largest companies,” said Ali.
The company will use this new funding to accelerate community expansion and product development in this new and fast-growing market. Product investments will focus on increasing the speed at which additional security, compliance, end user experience and orchestrations upgrades are added to the platform to meet the most demanding needs of Global 2000 enterprises.
Mattermost has experienced tremendous growth and customer traction in high-trust industries including strong adoption in the Global 2,000 and public sector organizations. Privacy-conscious enterprises seeking to increase productivity and empower technical teams through workplace messaging choose Mattermost over vendor-controlled alternatives that cannot meet strict security and data control requirements.
“Mattermost is an important contributor to Uber’s internal productivity. It is our internal standard for chat; empowering collaboration for our employees, and internal contractors. Its integration with our engineering and operational workflows helps ensure that our most well-known products are highly reliable,” says Ben Booth, IT director at Uber.
Mattermost is developed in deep partnership with its contributor community. The community is behind many of the innovations and breadth of features Mattermost is able to deliver. The Mattermost platform has been translated into 15 languages by the community and over 600 integrations have been built to extend the platform.
There are more than 1,000 contributors to core Mattermost software, and every month over 10,000 Mattermost servers are downloaded.
Just like with Digium – the growth of this platform will likely continue to skyrocket. The question becomes what the revenue model is to justify these lofty investment numbers. Service, support, product expansion, lateral relationships and brand extensions will be the likely areas of revenue focus.
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