Businesses @ Work

What are the most popular apps?

It's a marathon, not a sprint

First, let’s state the obvious: Office 365 is the most popular app in our network in both EMEA and the UK. More than 50% of both EMEA and UK customers use Office 365 today. But, the race is far from over with a recent shake-up among the other top apps.

G Suite is now the 3rd most popular app in EMEA (recently passing Salesforce) and 4th most popular in the UK. Additionally, G Suite is the 5th fastest growing app in EMEA, with 46% growth in the past six months, compared to Office 365 which grew 27% in the same time period. In the UK, G Suite is the fastest growing app with 45% growth in the past six months, compared to Office 365 which grew 28%.

AWS has also seen a significant increase in customer adoption, and today is the second most popular app in both EMEA and the UK. AWS grew 32% over the past six months in both EMEA and the UK. We anticipate AWS’ traction in both regions will continue, especially as Amazon invests in the region. AWS’ recent rise in Okta’s network correlates with the December 2016 launch of its London data centre, its third in Europe. As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels declared on his blog, “with the launch of the AWS Europe (London) Region, AWS can enable many more UK enterprise, public sector and startup customers to reduce IT costs, address data locality needs, and embark on rapid transformations in critical new areas.”

What are the top apps for G Suite and / or Office 365 customers?

G Suite vs. Office 365: to stack, or not to stack

Office 365 and G Suite have long secured the top two spots in the cloud email category. And as mentioned above, Office 365 has a significant lead within our customer base over G Suite. The app remains the most popular in our network, with 38% of EMEA customers using it exclusively, compared to 13% for G Suite. Interestingly, 15% of EMEA customers are using both applications.

Office 365 and G Suite are often positioned as fierce, head-to-head competitors. But, our data shows that may not be the case. Apart from the fact that a healthy segment of organisations in EMEA use both applications simultaneously, our data also shows that the app profiles of Office 365 and G Suite customers are quite different both in terms of quantity and apps most commonly used. On average, Office 365 customers use 36% fewer applications than G Suite customers. The median number of integrations for a G Suite customer is 15, compared to 11 for an Office 365 customer. This is likely because Office 365 customers aren’t purchasing Office 365 with email solely in mind. They leverage other products that often come bundled with the Microsoft stack, including Azure, OneDrive for Business, Teams, and Dynamics CRM. In contrast, G Suite customers are more likely to use a multi-vendor best-of-breed strategy as they build out their application ecosystems.

We also looked at the top apps used by G Suite customers in EMEA and those used by Office 365 customers. Our data revealed some interesting findings:

• Not all customers are making an “either/or” decision between these two apps. In fact, Office 365 is the most common application used by G Suite customers, with 55% usage.
• 37% of G Suite customers use Slack for messaging and collaboration today, while only 25% of Office 365 customers do. Will Slack be able to maintain its usage among Office 365 customers as Microsoft Teams ramps up? Only time will tell...
• Box and Dropbox are among the top 15 most popular apps for both Office 365 and G Suite customers. This is is especially interesting given that they each have their own file sharing functionality (Google Drive and OneDrive).

What collaboration tools are trending?

Slack’s reign continues

Slack continues to crush its competition with more than three times the number of integrations of any other messaging or collaboration app across Okta’s EMEA customer base. It’s the 7th most popular app in both EMEA and the UK. Even at the height of its success, Slack grew its EMEA customer base 33% in the last six months alone. And we’d only expect that to continue across the EMEA region with Slack’s recent foreign language support announcement — Slack is now available in French, German, and Spanish.

But incumbents refuse to call the race. Both Microsoft and Atlassian are making meaningful pivots in the market. Microsoft, which acquired Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011, recently announced that it is phasing out Skype and going all-in on Microsoft Teams. They’re encouraging Skype business customers to move to Teams as their messaging alternative. And in September, Atlassian announced the launch of its new product, Stride, as a direct response to Slack’s success.

Workplace by Facebook, is also gaining traction across the EMEA region, with impressive 33% growth (the same as category leader Slack) over the past six months. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this one.

What are the most popular developer tools?

As we discussed in our January global Businesses @ Work report, to survive in today’s world, every company needs to become a technology company. Your digital presence is a key growth factor for your business today. Increasingly, companies are acting on this. Managing developer tools and projects in-house has become a high priority for businesses. It allows organisations to take the reins of their own digital transformation.

So, how many EMEA organisations are using in-house developer tools? Lots, it turns out! Nearly 50% of EMEA customers use at least one developer tool today, indicating that customers are building their own apps. In fact, EMEA is the global leader in the adoption of developer tools compared to APAC and North America. Additionally, developer tools are the fastest growing app category in EMEA, with 44.1% growth in the past six months. And, we expect EMEA’s lead to continue as more companies are using developer tools than ever before.