By Deepa Seetharaman and Stu Woo
LONDON -- Facebook Inc. is used by a quarter of the world's
population to keep tabs on friends every month. Now, the
12-year-old social network is seeking similar dominance in the
corporate world.
On Monday, Facebook announced the commercial launch of Workplace
by Facebook, its enterprise tool for companies that allows workers
to chat and collaborate with each other. The tool was called
Facebook at Work while it was in testing for nearly two years.
Facebook said it would start charging a monthly fee, ranging
between $1 and $3 for every active user, giving it a new source of
revenue besides advertising.
Facebook faces dozens of rivals in the business-messaging market
eager to displace email as a primary work communication tool,
including Slack Technologies Inc., Microsoft Corp.'s Yammer offered
through Office 365, and Jive from Jive Software of Palo Alto,
Calif.
"E-mail is good and has its place, but none of us like that
endless email chain of reply all, reply all, reply all," Nicola
Mendelsohn, Facebook's vice president for Europe, Middle East and
Africa, said Monday at a news conference at the company's London
office. Monday's launch took place in London, the homebase of the
Workplace team that developed the tool.
Even though it is a newcomer, Facebook could be a serious threat
to incumbents because so many workers already use its website and
mobile app in their personal lives.
"Everyone knows Facebook, so adoption will be really fast," said
Christine Moorman, a professor at the Fuqua School of Business at
Duke University.
That was the case for telecommunications giant Telenor ASA,
which rolled out Facebook's software to its 35,000 employees
world-wide in March. Telenor is among the companies that have been
testing Facebook's program.
One Workplace feature allows employees from different companies
to create groups and chat using the enterprise software. Facebook
also forged new partnerships with others like enterprise cloud
company Box Inc., which allows Workplace users to share documents
from their Box accounts.
"Facebook has a significant chance of being a highly used
enterprise software," said Aaron Levie, chief executive and
co-founder of Box. "The energy and momentum they have in the
consumer space, I think they can bring to the enterprise."
Since January 2015, when Facebook at Work launched as a pilot
project, about 1,000 companies, including the Royal Bank of
Scotland, have been testing the service, up from 450 six months
ago, Facebook said Monday.
The enterprise service is modeled after Facebook's internal
corporate network. Like the ubiquitous social product, it opens to
a news feed with posts ranked based on an algorithm that takes into
account a user's previous activity on the corporate account. Users
can chat in groups or privately, and post and watch live videos as
well as share documents.
But Workplace has enterprise-grade security and administration
tools and a more sober gray color palette than the company's
signature blue, according to Facebook documents describing the
product. There aren't any ads.
Customers aren't required to have a personal Facebook account to
use Workplace and employers can't use the tool to see what
employees do on their personal accounts. Companies get data on
their employees' activity, including how many messages and posts
they send.
Still, some customers may worry that encouraging employees to
use Facebook might make them less productive, Ms. Moorman said.
"They'll probably have to reassure their customers that there will
be something that keeps people from just dealing with their
personal stuff at work," she added.
Companies have been slow to adopt social media tools for their
employees because workers need to be trained to use new software.
Enterprise social networks tend to be dominated by a small group of
superusers, but about half the employees don't use it at all,
according to some consultants.
Facebook didn't charge for the service during the pilot phase,
but now plans to levy a fee for every employee who uses the service
at least once a month. This is the first time Facebook has charged
a fee for its services.
Facebook will charge $3 for the first 1,000 employees, $2 for
the next 9,000 and $1 for every employee after that. This would
mean a $46,000 monthly fee for Telenor if all its 35,000 employees
used Facebook's service every month.
Facebook declined to say how many employees were using the
service.
Slack offers a free version of its messaging service alongside
two beefed-up packages that respectively cost $6.67 and $12.50 per
monthly user.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com and Stu
Woo at Stu.Woo@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 10, 2016 14:28 ET (18:28 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)
Historical Stock Chart
From Feb 2024 to Mar 2024
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2023 to Mar 2024