Bengaluru, June 1 SaaS major Slack has officially announced its India launch along with its mission to help Indian companies navigate the transition to a hybrid workplace by establishing a digital headquarters.
Slack has been operating in India for four years, establishing a product engineering team in Pune in 2018 following the company’s acquisition of Astro. The Slack India team has since grown to include a go-to-market function in the last year, and now has over 120 employees across four offices in Pune, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Gurgaon. Indian companies such as Zomato, Dreamsports, Freecharge, Razorpay, among others are already using Slack.
Freemium model
Slack has users in over 150 countries globally, out of which India represents one of the largest free user bases and is positioned in its top 10 markets for paid teams globally. “We have a very larger free user base in India. This tells us that there is a high level of awareness already existing in the Indian market, and high interest to try out and engage with the product. That’s our freemium model, which allows us to grow globally, as many of these free users eventually switch to a paid subscription,” said Rahul Sharma, Country Manager, India, Slack.
He added that on the customer side, Slack has a significant footprint in global companies such as IBM, Amazon, Intuit, and these organisations have a very large employee footprint in India, who again are using Slack. The company have a lot of users coming from tech engineering colleges. Large system integrators like TCS, Wipro are also major focus for Slack in India.
July 2021 marked the close of the acquisition of Slack by Salesforce, the customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Salesforce has had a presence in India since 2005 and today has over 6,500 employees across Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad.
“A Digital HQ allows work to flow, breaking down communication and collaboration silos, internally and externally; automates tasks that take away time from deep, meaningful work; and enables new, flexible ways of working, striking the right balance between synchronous and asynchronous,” the company said in a press statement.
A recent study conducted by Slack with over 2,000 Indian knowledge workers, The Reinvention of Work, found 4 in 5 respondents had a desire for flexibility, and a significant 80 per cent would seek a role elsewhere if their employer didn’t accommodate this.
Published on
June 01, 2022
