Today Slack made 3 announcements that help advance their efforts to evolve from just being a product to being a platform. This is very important, as you've heard me say over and over again, one of the key's to the success of any vendor is the strength of its partner ecosystem. The announcements are:
1. The Slack Fund, "a new $80 million dollar fund backed by Slack and six of our investors: Accel, Andreessen-Horowitz, Index Ventures, KPCB, Spark, and Social+Capital"
MyPOV: Developers have several options in the social business market. Should they spend their time building for Office365, Google for Work, Jive, Salesforce, etc? This fund should help motive developers to build applications and extensions that interact with Slack.
2. Botkit, "a new framework for Slack development that greatly simplifies the creation of apps (especially bots) with a flexible codebase that handles things like authenticating apps to a team and the sending, receiving, and processing of messages with our API"
MyPOV: This new framework should help developers who have been attracted by announcement #1 get started quickly. Removing the need to code the backend processes allows developers to focus on the business workflows of the applications.
3. New an improved Application Directory, "where you can find over 160 apps that can extend the capabilities of your Slack team"
MyPOV: Announcement #1 provides the incentive to build applications, announcement #2 helps developers do it, #3 is all about easily surfacing those new applications. The vast amount and variety of integrations available for Slack have been one its primary keys to success. Until now installing those integrations required a few steps and may have been too technical for some people. The new directory makes adding functionality to your Slack channels much easier, which will help drive adoption.
Here is a short video where I discuss today's news:
Are you currently using Slack? Are you planning to? Are you a developer building for Slack? Are you planning to?
I look forward to your feedback.