Supporting business resiliency in Australia and Asia Pacific

Today’s reality is testing the resilience and agility of every organization and worker. Top of mind for many is how to stay productive and keep teams engaged. Slack is here to help.

Tools in a time of transition

We’ve had a surge in demand for educational content and practical tips designed specifically for remote working so we wanted to share those upfront:

1. Join a remote work webinar. This free session starts with the basics to get you oriented within Slack, and then quickly introduces best practices tailored to remote work situations.
2. Learn remote work best practices from the experts. We’ve learned a lot from people using Slack for remote work, including internal teams. We’ve found that common concerns fall along three lines: staying productive, being visible, and creating human connections. See what works.
3. Connect with us if you are on the frontlines. As Covid-19 affects workforces across the globe, we’re making sure nonprofits can continue to function with a three-month access period to free Standard and Plus upgrades to all nonprofits, first announced on March 20.

And to further support our customers we are sharing some important updates on the state of our business in Australia.

Continued growth in user base

Today we have more than 277,000 daily active users in Australia. That’s more than a 1,000% increase since 2015. These users aren’t just logging into Slack, they’re using it to make their working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. They take nearly 100 million actions per week, whether it’s uploading files, collaborating with their teammates, streamlining processes with Workflow Builder, or working through a project remotely.

[Related content: See the global growth in Slack’s user base as shared by CEO Stewart Butterfield.]

Supporting scale and stability

With more people logging on each day, we also want to assure you that our infrastructure can handle it. While no systems can perfectly anticipate every contingency, we watch our systems scale up and down in real time every single day. Additionally, the demands on our infrastructure do not change when employees shift away from working together in the same office; there’s no difference in load on our systems whether people are connecting from their office, a cellular network or their home. Slack users are already logged in for an average of nine hours per workday.

Of those active users, we’re also seeing a huge percentage of them using mobile. In fact, 70% of our active users in Australia are using the Slack mobile app, and taking more than 15 million actions per week there.

New Sydney data region

Historically, Slack data has been stored in the U.S. but companies with data residency requirements wanted to keep their data closer to home. We’ve listened to the feedback and are now offering companies the ability to choose which region where they want to store their Slack data at rest. We recently released data regions in Frankfurt, Paris and Tokyo and are now excited to launch a data region in Sydney.

And please help us welcome our new head of APAC

We’re thrilled to introduce Matt Loop to our Slack team. He will be leading our Asia Pacific efforts after spending more than two decades driving growth and leading teams at globally recognized companies like Salesforce and LinkedIn.

We believe that, together, these are meaningful steps that will help Australia and Asia continue to excel on Slack. We hope that during these times, we can provide the clarity and assistance you require to succeed.

Thank you for your trust.