Microsoft Teams use boosted by pandemic work shift

Among the main beneficiaries of the pandemic-related shift to remote working have been suppliers of workplace collaboration and conferencing software.

New research from digital experience management platform Aternity shows that Microsoft has been a big winner with Teams usage increased nearly 3,900 percent since the beginning of pandemic.

All collaboration tools have shown big jumps though, best of the rest Zoom has grown by nearly 1,800 percent over the same period. Slack has seen 1,073 percent growth and Webex 1,070 percent.

The Microsoft Teams boost came at the expense of another Microsoft product, Skype for Business, which declined 63 percent between February 17 and December 20. Overall, Microsoft collaboration app usage (Teams and Skype for Business together) grew 391 percent.

However, the usage share of Microsoft collaboration apps fell from 93 percent to 83 percent between the same dates. At the same time Zoom tripled its usage share to 6.9 percent in 2020, while Slack and Webex more than doubled their shares to 4.9 percent each.

The combined enterprise usage share of Zoom, Slack and WebEx increased from six percent to 17 percent between February 17 and December 20.

The share of employees working remotely in North America remains at 79 percent, a five percent drop from the peak in the mid-March shift to remote work. In Europe, which was successful in reducing the spread of the virus in the spring and summer, only to see a resurgence this fall, 75 percent of employees are now working remotely, a six percent increase since October 25, but down nine percent from the peak in April.

You can find out more on the Aternity blog.

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