There is no shortage of competition for the enterprise messaging customer. Slack is the acknowledged leader but Cisco, Microsoft and everyone seems to want to get in on the market. The latest is Flock, a cloud-based team collaboration service, which has attracted 25,000 enterprise users and customers including Tim Hortons, Whirlpool and Princeton University.

According to Bloomberg: 

A teenage entrepreneur who became a millionaire by 20 before sharing a billion-dollar fortune at 36, Bhavin Turakhia isn’t afraid to think big. Now he’s putting $45 million of his own money into building a rival to Slack and other office messaging platforms.

The bottom line is the price Flock will charge is more than $3 per user less than Slack. So we can expect increasing competition in the space – mostly based on price.
Atlassian too is going to get more aggressive on price from what I hear. They also have a wide range of features in their portfolio – solutions like Jira, Confluence, HipChat, Trello etc.

The way to take on Slack will have to be two-pronged. One of course is price and will continue to be. The other is integration and features. 

The good news for Flock is the market is immature enough for new entrants but eventually there will be consolidation and customers will be lured to the solutions with the largest network. We can expect the UCaaS players to be part of the decision as well as chat apps naturally tie in to UC. Lets see what 8×8, Avaya, Cisco and others have to say about their position in this space. What acquisitions are on the horizon for example that could tie in a Slack-competitor with a strong UC player?

This will likely be the best way to take om Microsoft’s Skype for Business.

Bhavin has been successful before and if he is able to keep prices down while adding features and touting the size of his growing network, there is likely room for Flock to be successful.

There is no must have messaging solution at this point so the market is open for another well-financed competitor.