Image source: Facebook.
What happened
Facebook's (FB +1.25%) director for its new Workplace enterprise collaboration offering, Julien Codorniou, recently announced at TechCrunch Disrupt London that Workplace will soon support third-party custom integrations, which will add important functionalities for things like customer relationship management (CRM), file sharing, and email, among others.
The social network has released application programming interfaces (APIs) that will allow enterprise IT departments to customize Workplace for their own unique needs, delivering tools that their employees need to improve productivity and collaboration. Third-party integrations have been a critical aspect of Slack's success in recent years, and Workplace is designed to compete directly with Slack.
Does it matter?
In opening up Workplace to third-party integrations, Facebook shows that it's cognizant of what enterprise customers value and taking Workplace very seriously. A minor distinction is that Slack's approach is to make a user-friendly and approachable way to add integrations, while Facebook's is designed to be implemented by the corporate IT team, giving the enterprise greater control over how employees interact with the software.
More broadly, Workplace is Facebook's most serious attempt yet at targeting the enterprise. There's far more money in the enterprise market, and Facebook is also expanding distribution and working with reseller channels. Workplace has tremendous potential to open up entirely new and incrementally additive revenue streams for Facebook, even at its aggressive pricing levels that meaningfully undercut Slack. Following a pilot phase, Workplace launched broadly in October, so Facebook is just getting started.
