Teams Growth Accelerates to 420,000 Organizations

Microsoft FY19 Q2 Results Show Large Increase in Organizations Using Teams

Buried in the transcript of Microsoft’s earnings call with analysts following the announcement of their FY19 Q2 earnings on January 30 is the interesting observation by CEO Satya Nadella that: “We are seeing rapid adoption of Teams with more than 420,000 organizations of all sizes and 89 of the Fortune 100 using Teams – including customers like Pfizer which chose Teams as the collaboration platform for their 115,000 employees. “

That 420,000 number is an increase of 91,000 over the 329,000 used by Microsoft at the Ignite conference in September 2018. In fact, if you chart the numbers given by Microsoft for organizations using Teams over time, you see that growth is accelerating and is now around 30,000 new organizations per month.

Millions of Teams Seats

Last October, I looked at the number of users for Teams and Slack and calculated that the 329,000 organizations then using Teams might be around 33 million, if 100 people per organization used the app. Six of the 33 million were taken up by 60 organizations with more than 10,000 users each. The new number propels Teams users past 40 million.

Of course, no one knows the exact number of Teams users, and more importantly, how many of them have paid licenses. Microsoft didn’t say how many of the organizations used the free version of Teams. The fact that 89 of the Fortune 100 use Teams is interesting (2 more than in September 2018), but many of these might be testing.

Still Room to Grow

In any case, the raw data indicates that Teams is growing strongly. And in the context of 155 million active Office 365 users, there’s still room to grow. According to Microsoft’s results, the growth rate is slowing slightly and has gone from 30% in FY18 Q1 to 27% in FY19 Q2. However, as the base grows, it becomes harder to maintain a high growth rate, so it’s likely that Office 365 is still adding 3 million active users per month.

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For more information about Teams, read Chapter 13 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.