Why Slack Acquiring Rimeto is BRILLIANT
Tami Reiss is the founder of The Product Leader Coach where she works with product leaders and teams to realize their potential by focusing on their strengths.
Yesterday it was announced that Slack was acquiring Rimeto, a corporate directory product. I think this is a brilliant move by them.
Slack has been the golden child of the internal communication space for the past few years, first taking over every tech company and recently they have been inching into the corporate space. While going upmarket they are going up against a few competitors but mainly Microsoft’s Teams product, who is fighting back. If you are a big corporation, using the Microsoft suite is a no brainer, and that’s why they can claim 91% of the large companies in the US.
One of the reasons companies opt for the MS suite is that the functionality of Active Directory, a product you may have never heard of, but every CIO and CTO has. Active Directory has been the source of truth for user identities since the turn of the century. It allows your head of IT to manage every employee’s access to a variety of other services. Though Google, OKTA, and OneLogin have been nipping at their heels, Microsoft’s AD product is still omnipresent.
If you are a leader at Slack, you are thinking about how you can go up market right now. That common strategy makes a lot of sense for Slack. In the past few years they have captured a lot of the TAM in the middle market and are the go-to option for smaller startups who start with the free package and upgrade when funded.
As a result of this strategic intent shift up towards corporate customers, Slack added more features around security and to support larger organization in the past year or two. They’ve promoted these “enterprise grade” features and recently launched Slack Connect.
Now that you have some background, let’s go back to the acquisition of Rimeto and why it’s brilliant. This is Slack’s way of attacking Active Directory users, aka Microsoft’s strong hold on the large corporate space. Though they say Rimeto will remain stand alone (because otherwise it would cramp current negotiations to partner with Okta), I’m sure some of their functionality will be incorporated into Slack packages and default functionality to boost user productivity. Rimeto also has a a small but mighty portfolio of clients who can now be cross-sold Slack as an upgrade.
I’m excited to see how this will play out.
Hi! I’m Tami, the founder of The Product Leader Coach where I work with product leaders and teams to realize their potential by focusing on their strengths.
If you enjoyed this post, I am available for product leadership coaching or team training. Learn more about my services and upcoming children’s book.
