With apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams gaining popularity in the corporate and enterprise world, Google is looking to take a bite of the pie too as they are reportedly building a unified communication app for businesses that will be bringing the company’s different functions of its existing apps together.
This is an effort to compete better with application suites from its rivals like Slack and Teams. Teams has reached 20 million active users, a 7 million increase in just about 4 months and now almost double the number of active users when compared to Slack.
The app is said to include functionality from emails from Gmail, cloud storage from Google Drive, video calling from Hangouts Meet, text from Hangouts Chat and Google Calendar integration.
The app(no online version yet) is already being internally tested at Google and was detailed by Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian earlier this month. The app will fall under the G Suite family of productivity tools in a bid by the tech giant to attract more businesses for its enterprise division.
It’s strange how the G Suite team is almost exclusively working on products with enterprise customers in mind despite a large number of free customers using Google’s productivity tools.
Can’t wait for Google Hangouts Chat Allo for Business+ https://t.co/CUNZK8BbzH
— Kane 謝凱堯 (@kane) January 28, 2020
Google will presumably launch the app later this year at Google I/O and will be run by the Google Cloud team. The app will come in handy for businesses as they would no longer need to download and manage this Google’s growing list of standalone apps and instead have employees download a single app that combines all of the functions and services.
https://twitter.com/ow/status/1222278383368716289
I would love to have a coffee chat with the VPs and PMs involved in writing product specs for this hundredth chat app at Google https://t.co/xSfPHeaMXr pic.twitter.com/XjKHsDGyk2
— Sar Haribhakti (@sarthakgh) January 28, 2020
https://twitter.com/pierce/status/1222271922689282048
