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Summary
Meta has announced the discontinuation of its Workplace enterprise social platform and its partnership with Zoom Workvivo as the sole preferred migration partner for Meta’s installed base of around 7 million users.
Zoom Workvivo will provide migration tools for an easier transition to its platform and additional implementation services at no extra cost.
Workvivo presents an ideal opportunity for Zoom to implement a “land and expand” strategy ‒ establishing a foothold within Meta accounts and promoting Zoom’s workplace solution, which is a combined communication and collaboration platform for unified communications, collaboration, and customer/employee engagement.
Meta discontinues Workplace
Meta (formerly Facebook) has announced that it will shut down its Workplace platform completely by 2026, recommending Zoom Workvivo as an alternative new home for its 7 million users. Workplace was initially launched as an Enterprise Social Network (later rebranded as an Employee Engagement Platform) that aimed to connect employees across organizations and foster a sense of community and collaboration. Given the strong brand association and consumer use of Facebook, the prospects for Meta’s business-focused solution were good. The solution offered features including news and social feeds, chat, video calling, and integrations with third-party apps. As evidenced by customer use cases, Workplace had a good presence and adoption among businesses, with a strong presence of frontline workers who typically did not have a corporate email address.
Before unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) platforms became widely used, the enterprise social network (ESN) market category existed and was primarily positioned as a replacement for email and a place for employees to interact with colleagues, communicate with a broader audience, and collaborate over documents. This category included vendors such as BlueKiwi, Cisco Webex Social, IBM Lotus Connections, Jive Software, Yammer, and Facebook at Work (now known as Workplace from Meta). However, over the past decade, employees have preferred UCaaS platforms (such as 8x8, Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, RingCentral, and Zoom) as their main communication collaboration tools, largely due to the emergence of more flexible and mobile-centric work styles. Arguably, ESN platforms struggled to integrate seamlessly into employees’ workflow and become a “go-to” communications tool, unlike UCaaS, which is now an essential tool for daily work.
ESNs declined as a market category, and many versions were either acquired by alternative companies and/or retired. This can be attributed largely to its positioning as a replacement for email and the growing popularity of the adjacent and competing market category of UCaaS. Rather, ESN should have been repositioned as a viable alternative to corporate intranet sites. Corporate intranet sites encounter various challenges that affect their effectiveness and user adoption. These issues include poor navigation, outdated content, lack of governance, and user dissatisfaction. Addressing these challenges involves updating the design, improving navigation, establishing clear governance, and ensuring an engaging employee platform that has collaborative elements at its core. This requires significant ongoing investment by numerous departments within an enterprise.
Workvivo (a company Zoom acquired in early 2023) aims to replace the corporate intranet with an employee engagement platform focused on enhancing digital experiences and bringing organizational events, updates, and information alive in a dynamic way. Furthermore, user-based access control (e.g., admins and editors can publish global news articles and events or moderators can delete updates from activity feeds) facilitates user-generated content, eliminating the need for the specific skills required to maintain a corporate intranet.
Meta’s loss is Zoom’s gain, but there is also an opportunity for Microsoft
Meta’s decision to discontinue Workplace and choose Zoom’s Workvivo as its preferred migration partner creates an important opportunity for Zoom to increase its market share. Zoom has recently introduced its “Workplace” platform, which is a single, cloud-based platform that combines UCaaS and contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) capabilities, in addition to employee experience features. It includes various employee collaboration and productivity solutions, including Workvivo. Zoom’s comprehensive set of communication, collaboration, and employee engagement tools are likely to be appealing to current Meta Workplace customers, particularly frontline and hybrid workers who typically need specific apps on their mobile devices to support their roles and requirements. This segment of the workforce is ripe for digital transformation as it has long been hampered by a lack of effective mass and critical communication tools.
Zoom’s differentiation here is its single platform approach, its potential to leverage AI across its new unified platform, and its disciplined approach to product development. By keeping Zoom Team Chat as a specific tool for real-time or “synchronous” communication and Workvivo as an alternative to the corporate intranet for asynchronous collaboration, the distinction between which tool to use for different situations remains clear. This is very different to Zoom’s rival, Microsoft. Microsoft Teams has become a comprehensive hub, housing a selection of productivity, connectivity, and collaboration solutions, features, and functions that span numerous use cases. Omdia believes that Microsoft has continued to innovate, integrate, and develop its Microsoft Teams platform. However, as the vendor continues to invest in and diversify its platform, it must ensure it does not increase the capabilities to the extent that it negatively impacts user experiences, especially for employees who rely more on their mobile devices as their primary interface for work.
Developing solutions to cater more specifically to the needs of frontline workers is important, both from a licensing and functionality perspective. Omdia estimates that the frontline segment makes up around 60% of the total workforce, so the opportunity is significant. Many frontline tasks and processes are prime for digitization, and communication and collaboration platforms will be a solution central to the transformation of frontline work. Targeting industries including retail, travel, and hospitality will be important, as will delivering a proposition that resonates with senior business leaders beyond the IT department.
Although Meta has highlighted Zoom as its preferred migration partner for customers, it is important to remember that this also provides an opportunity for Microsoft. For businesses heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem for productivity applications, choosing Teams over Zoom may be more practical. However, the lack of a clear use case for Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) may provide Zoom Workvivo with a distinct advantage, especially as Workvivo’s integration with Microsoft Teams allows employees to access a centralized location for company updates and instantly connect with colleagues using Teams for real-time communication. Omdia would advise that Zoom focuses heavily on the frontline worker use case here.
Existing customers can continue using Meta Workplace until August 2025. Customers will have access to their data until the end of May 2026, when the platform will be retired. Meta will focus on AI and metaverse technologies, which the company believes will reshape the way we work. This provides Zoom with ample time to effectively position Workvivo as an alternative to the corporate intranet, which is an essential tool for frontline workers, and to demonstrate Zoom’s potential as a multi-CaaS platform.
Appendix
Further reading
Digital Workplace Analyst Call: MultiCaaS - 1Q24 (May 2024)
Enterprise Connect 2024: Employee experience and mobile collaboration take center stage (April 2024)
Zoom, “Workvivo by Zoom is named preferred migration partner for Workplace from Meta”, May 2024
Authors
Adam Holtby, Principal Analyst, Workplace Transformation
Tim Banting, Practice Leader, Digital Workplace
