HPE Discover is upon us once again, and the infrastructure company’s executives, representatives, customers and fans will shortly be descending on Las Vegas’ Palazzo hotel to hear what the company has in store for the forthcoming year.

CEO Antonio Neri will need to come out swinging, too. Despite HPE’s first-quarter revenue beating estimates to the tune of $600 million, his first year in the role has seen the company lose ground to main rivals Dell EMC in the server market in both revenue and market share.

HPE does have some things to shout about, however; the last few months have seen the company announce major deals, including a network modernising contract with Gatwick Airport worth $15 million, and the installation of a supercomputer cluster across three UK universities. The company has also launched new offerings based around AI and blockchain – two themes that will be pushed hard at next week’s event.

Of course, hand-in-hand with AI and machine learning comes big data and analytics. Hardcore number-crunching and AI algorithms are two big reasons for companies to upgrade their servers, so expect these to be big use-cases for HPE to use in promoting its latest ProLiant data centre products. After all, that’s what Dell did at its conference earlier this year.

HPE also launched its Greenlake pay-per-use pricing structure last year, so we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see new announcements around this as part of the conference. Flexible consumption models are all the rage at the moment as more and more businesses shift their expenditure towards OpEx and away from CapEx, so now is an excellent time for HPE to big up its capabilities in this area.

Another thing we wouldn’t be surprised to see the company making a big deal about is the work it’s doing in the field of high-performance computing. The aforementioned partnerships with UK universities are one such example, but a far more impressive one is the fact that HPE has sent a number of its servers into space – we’d love to hear more about this, and we suspect that we won’t be disappointed.

We’re also hoping to see some new metal from Neri and company. The last few products that IT Pro has had the pleasure of testing have been deeply impressive, including the ProLiant DL560 Gen10, MSA 2052 Storage, and the ProLiant ML110 Gen10 – five-star scores and Editor’s Choice awards across the board. If HPE continues this trend, it may be able to gain some ground back on Dell.

All in all, HPE has some points to prove to investors and customers alike – but it’s got some good cards in its hand. Whether it’ll be able to play them correctly is something we’ll have to wait and see.

Image courtesy of HPE

Slack has announced a suite of new developer tools, as part of a range of platform changes designed to foster the growth of its app ecosystem.

The new features will make it much quicker and easier for developers to build and test Slack apps within Slack itself, according to the company’s developer advocacy lead, Bear Douglas.

“Right now if, for example, you want to try out Slack’s API, you have to go create an app token, you have to get the keys you need, you maybe have to spin up a project, spin up a web server, in order just to ping calls to our API,” she told Cloud Pro. “Now, what you’ll be able to do is install an app inside Slack and then directly from Slack test out our API.”

Reference documents are also easier to access. Developers can now search them via a Slack command, and they can then be read within the Slack client, or the longer-form version can be accessed by clicking out to Slack’s website.

The changes were announced as part of Spec 2018, the company’s inaugural annual conference for developers, customers and partners.

Alongside these developer tools, the company is also launching some new features designed to make Slack apps more visible for everyday users. The most prominent is App Actions – a framework for adding third-party app integrations to the three-dot menu that currently houses functions including pinning messages to channels and marking them as unread.

The feature will launch with pre-made integrations for five services, including Asana, Bitbucket, HubSpot, Zendesk and Jira. As an example, the feature will allow users to convert a Slack message from a colleague directly into an Asana task.

Power users of Slack will likely be aware that these kinds of integrations already exist, in the form of Slack commands. These already allow users to interact with third-party services in a number of ways, such as adding tasks to project management tools, sharing files from cloud storage platforms, and more.

In fact, Douglas told Cloud Pro that the new App Actions don’t actually add any new functionality that wasn’t already offered by Slack commands, but emphasised that they provide a much more intuitive and user-friendly way to access these capabilities, pointing out that while developers and techies are inherently familiar with using slash-based commands thanks to tools like IRC, most line-of-business users are much more used to contextual menu systems.

“It’s not something that should be undersold, because at the moment, a lot of users … may not be aware of the integrations that are already installed on their team, and so some of the work that we’ve done over the past year and a half or so has been on making integrations more discoverable.”

One App Action that may prove very useful is the ability to view the JSON for specific elements within Slack.

“If you see something beautiful inside Slack,” Douglas said, “and you wonder ‘how can I do that?’, there will be an Action in that overflow menu that lets you inspect the JSON for that message. So if you want to copy something beautiful you saw, or just break it down, you can do that automatically without leaving Slack.”

Making apps more attractive is something that the company is emphasising, and it will soon launch a new toolkit for modifying the UI of Slack Apps, which it is dubbing ‘Block Kit’.

Slack is aiming to build on its initial success as an enterprise collaboration platform, pursuing a partnership-based strategy in which the platform integrates as deeply as possible with the numerous SaaS-based tools that businesses rely on. The strategy is similar to the tactic Facebook has taken with its Workplace platform, which also announced a slew of new integrations earlier in the year.

“They’re absolutely integral. They’re what makes Slack more useful than just a messaging service, and it’s something that we try to make clear to our [third-party] developers: that they are key to our success,” Douglas told Cloud Pro.

“It’s really about lowering the barriers and making it easy to build Slack apps. So we’re building our tooling offering all the time, and we’re trying to be as responsive as possible.”

Cloud management company Virtustream is gearing up to launch a blockchain-as-a-service offering, indicating that Dell may be gearing up to take on IBM, Oracle, SAP and AWS, which all have their own blockchain-branded services.

Speaking at Dell Technologies World, the annual conference hosted by Virtustream’s parent company, Dell’s field CTO Adam Robyak told attendees that Virtustream is preparing a new blockchain-based platform offering for customers.

“They’re actually launching something they’re doing, which is their blockchain-as-a-service offering; where they’ll actually host and manage nodes for our customers, whether that’s on your premise or in their cloud.”

This product has not yet been formally announced, so details on it are somewhat scarce. However, it would appear to compete directly with IBM’s blockchain platform offering, as well as similar products from Microsoft Azure and AWS.

Robyak also revealed that Virtustream is also applying blockchain tools to other areas as well.

“One of the other things that they do is they have a huge analytics backend called Megalithics that focuses around performance metrics,” he said. “What they’ve decided to do is extend that into the blockchain world to actually allow customers who need traceability of audit logs for their infrastructure environments to be able to dump that onto a blockchain without the logs having been tampered with.”

“If I just pushed out a hundred VMs, if I just shut down 17 servers, whatever the case may be – having the ability to not only gather those logs, but prove out that they haven’t been tampered with is huge.”

Cloud Pro has approached Virtustream for comment, but had not recieved a response at the time of writing.

Robyak is one of the founders of Dell Technologies’ blockchain steering committee, so a certain level of enthusiasm for the technology is understandable. However, not all of his colleagues share that enthusiasm.

Zulfikar Ramzan, CTO of fellow Dell Technologies-owned brand RSA, blockchain is still not at a sufficient point of maturity to lend itself to enterprise applications, and he pointed out: “Many of the applications that you can solve using blockchain, you can solve using much more basic techniques that are not called blockchain”.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy appeared to share that view at re:Invent 2017, telling press that blockchain lacked “practical use cases” and that “we don’t build technology because we think it’s cool” – before releasing a blockchain service itself late last month.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger has confirmed the company’s intentions to integrate machine learning technology into all of its products, highlighting four main areas in which the company is actively working on integrating the technology.

Speaking to press and analysts at Dell Technologies World 2018, Gelsinger talked about several areas in which VMware is already using machine learning,as well as teasing the introduction of ML to its vRealise management suite.

“I really see that we’ll be putting AI and ML essentially into our product line everywhere. We’ll find ways to simply bring more intelligence,” Gelsinger said. “You’ll see us making announcements later this year, where we’ll be adding AI and machine learning into our vRealise suite, because that benefits us for workload placement. And actually, that’s been a pretty good area where machine learning has demonstrated some quite dramatic results.”

VMware is already using AI and ML in various areas of its business, Gelsinger revealed, including using it in vSAN to optimise disk performance and predict failure rates, in AppDefense to automatically flag suspicious VM behaviour and in VMware Skyline.

“If you’re in a place that making any kind of forward-looking view, machine learning seems to be demonstrating very good results in a variety of these areas,” Gelsinger said.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been major focus areas for Dell at this year’s conference. Many of its new data centre products have been positioned as being particularly suited to these tasks, and the company has even built machine learning into its new PowerMax storage array to automatically optimise performance.

Facebook is broadening the scope of Workplace with 50 new integrations, allowing companies to link their Workplace deployments to numerous popular enterprise SaaS tools.

The new functionalities, unveiled today at the social network’s annual conference in California, include partnerships and tie-ups with some of the biggest business software providers in the market, such as Atlassian, ServiceNow, Adobe and more.

These integrations are part of Facebook’s effort to move Workplace away from its genesis as a Slack-style business collaboration tool to the business automation tool Facebook envisions it becoming.

“Basically what it means is that Workplace is going from collaboration and communication to automation and IT integration,” Facebook’s vice president of Workplace, Julien Cordoniou, told Cloud Pro.

“You’ll see the usual suspects; the apps and the integrations that people have to use every day to get the job done, and they’ll be using Workplace as the one app that will connect all of their other apps [to] help the job to get done much faster.”

Facebook’s reimagining of Workplace came partly in response to seeing software developer users using Workplace to collaborate, but Jira to track the progress of agile projects.

“A lot of companies are using Workplace on one side and Jira on the other side,” Cordoniou explained, “so what we did was to connect these two apps to use Workplace as the place of discovery and distribution and notification, but we’d take you to Jira as often as possible.”

Along with Jira, Cordoniou was keen to talk about the new integrations with Microsoft’s Sharepoint, Marketo and SurveyMonkey. The new integrations will be available only to companies who subscribe to Workplace’s ‘Premium’ tier.

However, the SaaS integrations that Workplace originally launched with in 2016 – Box, Office 365, Okta, Salesforce and others – are now being made available to the service’s ‘Standard’ tier users.

Although Facebook has announced a slew of new integrations for its enterprise platform, Cordoniou was keen to stress that Workplace is not an open ecosystem where anyone is free to upload their own apps and integrations. “This is a directory; a closed and highly curated directory,” he said.

While any large SaaS companies that have not already been approached by Facebook to create Workplace integrations are invited to get in contact, Cordoniou was clear that this isn’t an open opportunity.

“We want to work with the applications that people already use, so if you’re a major SaaS company and you’re not on that list, you need to contact us to join the directory – but that’s the criteria. This is not a call for every developer in the world,” he said.

There’s one problem that virtually every company is guaranteed to run into over the course of its lifetime, and it’s one that can have serious knock-on implications for a business’ future if not addressed early on. The problem is, how do you maintain your company’s culture and values as you transition from a startup to a scale-up and beyond?

The importance of maintaining a good corporate culture can’t be overstated; it’s one of the main ways you can attract and retain talent, and neglecting it can result in reputational damage. In 2017, the tech industry was faced with a cautionary tale in the form of Uber. Of all the numerous scandals, gaffes and mishaps that befell the company over the course of the year, the vast majority could be traced back to issues with its culture and values.

If you want to avoid following the same path, it’s essential to ensure that your guiding principles don’t fall by the wayside when the money starts rolling in. One of the best ways to do that is by firmly establishing a mission statement and a code of conduct early on in your company’s life.

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The right ethos

A mission statement is essential for any business, but don’t fill it with nebulous, vaguely-worded pledges – get specific. Setting out detailed and focused guidelines provides a touchstone that you can continually refer back to to ensure you haven’t lost your way.

Maintaining a strong culture relies on collaboration and co-operation with everyone in the business playing their role, according to LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. “If your only culture is top-down hierarchy and messaging and communications that comes from the top, that culture won’t survive as you really balloon the organisation,” he said. “Instead, you want a horizontal accountability. You want it so that everybody is keeping everyone else accountable to the culture that we’re in.” (Source: https://blog.ycombinator.com/sam_reidhoffman_scaleupoffsite/)

He points to Netflix boss Reed Hastings’ ‘culture deck’, a series of slides that detail exactly what Netflix’s culture and values are.

Another crucial point to make regarding the transition from startup to scale-up is that you shouldn’t mistake aesthetic for culture. If your only commitment to maintaining your startup values is a couple of ping-pong tables and some bean bags, it’s going to be painfully obvious.

In fact, your working space should be the least important thing about your corporate culture. Instead, the foundation of your organisation should be the people within it. Staffing and recruitment are, naturally, very important when scaling a company, and you should welcome the ideas and fresh perspectives your new blood brings in – these keep a company agile and innovative.

“The most important thing isn’t how shiny and full their CV is,” Carl Reader, author of The Start Up Coach, says, “it’s in whether their attitude is going to fit in with – and hopefully enhance – your company culture.

“Without a team that’s on the same page as you, the coherent, growth-minded culture you have so carefully developed as a startup will simply dissolve.”

As Hoffman points out, however, your hiring will need to change as your company scales, and you’ll have to step back and trust your colleagues to hire well, something that will require you to systematise.

Cain Ullah, CEO of digital consultancy Red Badger, shares these views, saying: “As you scale you need to work out how to scale excellence throughout your company from culture to skills.

“It starts with alignment. To scale you need to be able to let go, empower others and give them autonomy to excel at what they do best.”

But Hoffman advises that keeping a small role in it can be an excellent way to maintain control over the culture, ensuring that potential new hires are a good fit.

People problems

Unfortunately, expansion can also cause senior leadership to lose touch with the staff at the coalface. As the number of employees increases, the amount of time you can spend getting to know individual teams and staff members decreases, but you should make an effort not to lose touch with the trenches. Town halls and all-hands meetings are great, but as a company scales, it becomes harder and harder to get a true sense of your staff’s opinions and values.

Tim Stone, COO for European IoT investor Breed Reply, says introducing more structured meetings, more sophisticated communication plans, CRM tools and clear roles and responsibilities for people can help keep that entrepreneurial spirit as your business grows.

Take time to meet with staff in smaller settings, and instruct all levels of leadership to do the same. Not only will this make employees feel like valued members of the team who can make positive contributions, but management can also keep its finger on the pulse of employee sentiment even as headcounts balloon.

David Levine, CEO of home interiors startup DigitalBridge, found success with a similar tactic. “To ensure that everyone continues to have a voice as we grow, we implemented regular company-wide vision and feedback sessions,” he says.

“These meetings are driven by an ethos of ‘creative friction’, in which everybody is actively encouraged to put forward their own ways of working, perspectives and experiences. We can all offer something different, and the key to collaborative growth lies in embracing everybody’s unique perspectives.”

Y Combinator founder Sam Altman points out that it’s worth taking the time to consider the place of early employees within a rapidly-growing company, to stop them leaving as their roles see them work less closely with the top brass.

“It’s people that have gone from being absolutely on the inside to not, that leads to a huge amount of turnover,” he says, “and I think it’s worth thinking proactively if someone is special enough that I’m going to somehow include them in the executive team.”

One tactic highlighted by Altman is that of Airbnb founder Brian Chesky, who spends around two-thirds of his nights taking early Airbnb staffers to dinner, talking about the state of the company, what issues they’re facing and other subjects, which can help them still feel connected, even if they’re not at the upper executive level.

The role of the cloud

Technology can also be an excellent way to stay connected. Cloud collaboration tools have obvious advantages in terms of connecting individuals and teams who are separated by distance, but they can also help foster a positive culture within your organisation. Using collaboration tools for discussing non-work topics can create a sense of community between employees outside of work, and ensuring that executives are both active and approachable on these platforms stops barriers forming between staff and management.

Adopting new ways of working, and tech that supports it, can mitigate some of the speed and responsiveness a larger company inevitably loses, too. Working agile in other ways, such as by using DevOps methodologies, as well as adopting cloud-based infrastructure and SaaS applications that unite and provide greater transparency across key functions such as finance, HR and marketing, helps.

Some chaos – both internal and external –  is an unavoidable side-effect of rapid scaling though, Altman notes, and it’s important that your business is flexible enough to cope with it. “ You know, people that run these perfectly non-chaotic organisations somehow never build great companies,” he says. “The trade-off is we’re going to accept a little bit of chaos in exchange for a shot at one of these massive, great companies, and founders just have to sell that to their teams. It’s hard.”

However, while all this rapid change is going on, companies need to make sure that they’re being careful with their money. Change can be good, but change for its own sake – particularly when accompanied by financial investment – can lead to companies burning through their cash reserves too quickly. Look at your existing resources and work out where you actually need to make investments, and where your existing operations will suffice.

Ultimately, culture is one of the trickiest things for any business to get right, but it’s also one of the most vital. A strong culture can carry a company through countless rough patches, but a weak culture can undermine a seemingly-successful business from within. The key is to establish a good culture early on in your company’s life, and to keep it front-of-mind as you grow.

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Scaling your business can be a tricky proposition for any startup. But once you reach a certain size, it can be easy to lose sight of your roots and forget the elements that made your company so dynamic when it was small.

There are many lessons that large enterprises can take from startups, which you can use to ensure your company is still agile and innovative even when it’s home to hundreds or even thousands of employees.

Lead by example

One of the most common shared attributes of successful tech firms that have gone from being small startups to major industry players is that they’re almost always helmed by a strong leadership team. Box, for example, is still headed up by its four co-founders, Aaron Levie, Sam Ghods, Dylan Smith and Jeff Queisser. Ghods and Queisser are focused more on the site’s architecture and technical development, as opposed to Levie and Smith’s C-level roles, but all four still have an active an integral role in the company.

Similarly, Dell Technologies is still led by original founder and namesake Michael Dell. Aside from a brief three-year period between 2004 and 2007, Dell has led the company for its entire lifetime. In both cases, the companies have benefited from the founders’ clear vision and deep commitment to the long-term well-being of the business.

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It’s not just the person at the top, though; successful startups also benefit from an executive team with a wide variety of backgrounds, skills and specialisations. This is easy when you’re a startup – the nature of startups is that they’re generally fairly diverse. When your company starts making money, however, you may find your board comprised of an increasing number of carbon copy individuals.

Aside from being undesirable from an equality standpoint, this replication also means that your board won’t bring the maximum potential experience to bear on problems. If you look at the companies who have successfully transitioned from startup to global powerhouse, they almost universally have board members with backgrounds in engineering, finance, planning, operations and more.

A strong leadership team also lessens the risk that the company will be subject to the whims of investors and other market forces, influences which can drive a company’s strategy away from long-term growth in favour of short-term profits and stability. One of the hallmarks of a startup is its willingness to take risks and explore untested waters, but when a company matures, this adventurous spirit is often abandoned as businesses prioritise safer tactics.

It’s important to remember, however, that increased risks can lead to vastly increased rewards. Google is an excellent example in this regard; the company has continually proven its commitment to invest in innovation, and fund the development not only of risky plays in its own market, but also wild moonshots into totally untested markets like self-driving vehicles.

Innovation can be risky, certainly – but Google provides an excellent blueprint for how to leverage the resources, talent and capital of a large enterprise to maintain the cutting-edge mindset that it had when it was still a startup. According to Dan White, CEO of insurance-focused digital transformation consultancy Ninety, adopting the concept of ‘innovation labs’ can help big companies recapture some of that startup magic.

“Some of these are failing, but those that are helping the whole employee base learn to innovate, and giving them a platform on which to do so, are succeeding in embedding startup practices and values in their day-to-day operations,” White says.

The same sentiment is echoed by Tim Stone, the COO of European IoT investor Breed Reply. “As well as the founder, successful businesses have many internal entrepreneurs,” he says. “Evangelists for new ideas that need to be empowered and not stifled by process. For bigger firms, allowing innovation and ownership of ideas outside their responsibilities, which startups do more naturally, is vital.”

Failure can be a good thing

One of the inevitable consequences of innovation is failure. No company will have a 100 percent success rate when it comes to new projects and ideas, and some of the products and initiatives you attempt will be disasters. The important thing is not to be put off by those failures. Apple is the best proof of this; despite being one of the biggest tech companies on the face of the planet and arguably the gold standard in hardware design, the history of Steve Jobs’ company is littered with bloopers.

Take the Apple III, for instance – a famously poorly-designed product which overheated so badly that chips would actually melt out of their sockets. Then there was Apple’s ill-fated games console, the Pippin, which had a $559 price tag and sold a measly 40,000 units. Neither of these failures (or the many, many others) succeeded in denting Apple’s passion for innovation, and Jobs’ dedication paid off when the iMac, iPhone, iPod and iPad all became the pinnacles of their fields. Incidentally, it’s worth noting that Apple is another company whose success is thanks in no small part to the work of a talented and visionary leader.

Carl Reader, author of The Start Up Coach, is a big proponent for allowing businesses to make mistakes. “As with any corporate culture, embracing failure positively has to come from the top and become part of the fabric of the organisation,” he says.

“The leader has to not only give permission for their teams to fail, but also admit failures of their own, and demonstrate how the learnings from any failure have been used.”

It’s no big surprise that tech companies aren’t shy about making use of the latest and greatest software tools in order to maximise their efficiency and productivity, but it’s nevertheless an example that all large enterprises can learn from. Startups are great at jumping on new, innovative tools and processes as soon as they’re available, which can pay dividends in terms of output.

Remember to think small as well as big

Larger businesses, on the other hand, can often fall foul of the ‘sunk cost fallacy’. This particular logical error means that the more you’ve invested in a particular thing – in terms of either time or money – the more unwilling you are to abandon it and move on. It’s the thing that convinces your brain that because you’ve put so much into it, leaving it behind would be a waste.

This fallacy frequently leads large businesses to stick with complex, unwieldy legacy IT tools, simply because they’ve spent so much money on them. In actual fact, however, moving to newer cloud-based SaaS tools can actually end up saving your business money. Not only are they often cheaper in the long run than the cost of maintaining legacy systems, the man-hours that can be saved with more intuitive and fully-featured tools add up quickly. According to a 2017 Forrester Research survey, cost reduction was a top factor for over half of organisations that are currently in the process of migrating to the cloud.

“Of course, stay true to your business and your clients,” advises Reader. “But don’t get stuck in the ‘this is how we do it’ mindset. A common word in the startup lexicon is ‘pivot’ – in other words, look at what isn’t working or isn’t serving your business best, and adjust accordingly. Listen to what your staff and clients are telling you. Inaccuracies and inefficiencies all impact the customer experience negatively, so take advantage of feedback, new ideas and advancing technology to improve your service and systems.”

Thinking like a startup also necessitates a change in which metrics you use to judge success, White says. “One way of driving startup behaviour within large corporates is to emulate some of the things that startups measure. For instance, a real focus on what are called ‘traction metrics’. These are a form of ‘leading indicator’, i.e. a metric that tells you what the future might contain, rather than what the past achieved. Examples of these are user sign-up rates, engagement time, attrition rates, et cetera.”

By taking these elements into consideration and tactically borrowing from the startup playbook, larger companies can re-integrate the energy and passion of a startup back into their business, which can fuel future growth and innovation. Becoming a large enterprise doesn’t mean that you need to become boring, predictable and risk-averse. Remember, when it comes to your company, it’s not the size the counts; it’s how you use it.

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Artificial intelligence is one of the biggest buzzwords in the business world right now, with scores of companies rushing to take advantage of advances in machine learning and neural networks.

Facebook is one such company, and the social network has invested a great deal of time and energy into building support for chatbots and AI tools into platforms like Facebook Messenger.

It has also extended these functionalities to Workplace, its enterprise collaboration platform that now has 30,000 customers.

At MWC in Barcelona, Julien Cordoniou, Facebook’s vice president for Workplace, told Cloud Pro that artificial intelligence and bots are key to the tool’s future.

“The move from collaboration to automation is a pattern we see across every company, every industry and all of our customers,” he said. “Turning Workplace from being a collaboration platform into an automation platform is what we define as next-generation IT.”

According to Cordoniou, Workplace customers like Norwegian retailer Elkjop are changing the way they use the platform, making use of Workplace’s bot support to automate tasks like inventory management and shift management.

“I think it’s extremely important. If artificial intelligence can be used to automate some of the repetitive tasks that you don’t necessarily want to be doing, or that you don’t want your employees to do, I think it’s a big win for the company. And that’s typically the kind of thing that drives employee happiness, employee sentiment and hopefully employee retention.”

Amazon is also making a big effort to work AI into its commercial offerings, launching Alexa for Business as a way to let customers use voice-activated AI for practical tasks like booking meetings.

Most customers, Cordoniou said, are still buying Workplace as a collaboration tool, in an effort to reduce the distance between head office and frontline staff. The product has been particularly successful in the retail and manufacturing sectors, where workers on production lines or shop floors don’t have a desktop device with which to access traditional intranets or enterprise messaging tools.

Danone, for example, has 80,000 workers, half of whom are factory workers who have never had a company laptop – but they do all have mobile phones. This also applies to Walmart’s 2.5 million staff, who also use Workplace to communicate.

However, he told Cloud Pro that he thinks this is changing, and that bots and other solutions will soon be as big a driver as Workplace’s collaboration tools. “In a few years, people will buy Workplace for the network and the communication platform that it is, but they will also buy Workplace for the quality and the diversity of the applications that they will find on top of the platform,” he said.

“It’s certainly a conversation we have with every customer, and this is also where we want to take them to. We don’t just want to be a communication platform, we want to be the platform where you go to do your job, to get the job done – and that goes with automation.”

Facebook is also committed to building a platform rather than a product with Workplace. Rather than attempting to be a one-stop shop, Cordoniou said, Facebook’s strategy is to partner with best-of-breed companies like Box, Okta, Microsoft, Google and others.

This, he said, allows customers the specifically tailor workplace to their needs, or even to build their own solutions of top of it using tools like AI. “We don’t want to build everything ourselves. We know very well what we do well and what we don’t do well,” he said. “For me, it’s a partnerships play.”