How partners are fueling growth and innovation on Microsoft Teams
Recently I shared how Microsoft Teams is enabling a new way of work by integrating frequently used apps and processes into your digital workspace. Teams not only enables you to meet, chat, call, and collaborate with your team, but it also serves as a platform that brings together the apps and workflows that help you get your work done. In fact, users utilizing third-party apps and custom-built solutions in Teams every month grew over seven times year-over-year. We also know that a workplace platform is only as good as the ecosystem of relevant and useful applications and custom integrations available. Because of this, we continue to invest in Teams platform capabilities to enable and empower our partners to continue to build new, innovative solutions. When our partners succeed, we succeed, and together we bring more value to our customers.
Designed as a platform for innovation
The beauty and strength of Microsoft Teams is that it’s designed as a surface where partners can interweave capabilities to create innovative, productivity-enhancing solutions. Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive, described the vision of Teams as the “flywheel of innovation that starts to spin and quickly gains momentum.” And today we’ve seen the pace of innovation accelerating with the great solutions that our partners have built for our customers to use in Teams. With the broadest canvas to build upon—from bots, messaging extensions, cards, and apps across chat and meetings to name a few—partners have created amazing solutions that reach people where they are and fit the needs of customers in this digital, post-pandemic business environment.
Building a healthy business with solutions on Microsoft Teams
We are proud to have such a strong and thriving ecosystem of partners who are continuously pushing the bounds of innovation with the solutions they’ve built on Microsoft Teams. From the more than 800 Teams apps built by independent software vendors (ISVs) and published in our store to the thousands of systems integrators (SIs) who are developing custom Teams solutions—our partners are growing their business and finding immense value from building on Teams. Partners like Cyclotron have already seen incredible demand from customers seeking Teams solutions.
“We are seeing close to five times growth in business in our Teams as a platform practice. The best part is that we are solving new business challenges with a new model for deployment across all devices with enterprise-grade auth, security, and compliance.”—Amber Bahl, Founder and CEO of Cyclotron
Most importantly, our customers are benefitting from all of these solutions that increase employee productivity and enhance collaboration. In a recent Forrester study on the Total Economic Impact of Partner Applications on Teams, 95 percent of respondents indicated that apps for Teams increased team performance.1
Empowering employees with Microsoft Teams apps built by leading ISVs
Our partners create rich and powerful Microsoft Teams apps that enhance the collaboration and employee experience in Teams. We love seeing how ISVs innovate and bring creative solutions to customers on Teams.
Adobe
Bringing the richness of Adobe’s tools directly into Teams makes it easier for people to connect and create together. Adobe Creative Cloud for Microsoft Teams enables designers to easily collaborate with asset sharing and notifications in Teams. Adobe Acrobat for Microsoft Teams unlocks the power of PDF, enabling users to create, edit, annotate, and share documents. And Adobe Sign for Microsoft Teams enables organizations to streamline workflows requiring e-signature or secure approvals. Together we’re bringing great experiences to meet people where they are and how they work.
Moveworks
Moveworks provides instant tech support—directly on Microsoft Teams. Employees simply describe their IT issues to the Moveworks bot in natural conversational language. By leveraging advanced natural language understanding (NLU), Moveworks determines what’s needed and then fixes the problem quickly, without any help from the IT team. Customers like Equinix credit Moveworks with driving Teams adoption, IT service cost savings, and automating away one-third of all tech issues.
“We’ve seen Microsoft Teams emerge as a powerful digital workplace in this new normal since it brings together the entire employee experience on a single hub for collaboration. With Moveworks, our customers have added instant IT support to that consolidated experience—helping drive new employees to the Teams platform. That’s why we’re continuing to invest heavily in our Teams integration, with additional features that leverage Graph, personal tabs, and more.”—Varun Singh, VP of Product, Moveworks
ServiceNow
ServiceNow is making work better for people, creating employee-centered experiences that help increase productivity and reduce friction—regardless of the department or location an employee is working. Together, Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow are finding innovative ways to shape the future of work. ServiceNow workflows embedded into Microsoft Teams and a recent integration with Microsoft Viva demonstrate our strength and shared mission of keeping employees connected and simplifying work.
“Our integrations with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Viva provide one-stop-shop access to information and services for employees across IT, HR, Facilities, Legal, and Finance. ServiceNow Employee Workflows provide unified experiences for employees across the enterprise, and we’re thrilled to continue to partner with Microsoft to enhance engagement, collaboration and productivity for the future of work.”—Melanie Lougee, Head of Employee Workflow Strategy at Service Now
Creating solutions to meet the unique needs of customers
Every organization has processes and ways of working that are unique to them and often require solutions that need to be tailored for them. Our system integrator partners bring their expertise of Teams and Microsoft technology to bring to solve the toughest challenges facing customers.
Avanade
Teams is helping Avanade make remote, hybrid, and more flexible working a reality for its clients—maintaining business continuity and productivity while protecting employee wellbeing. Avanade is now going further to capture the broader Teams opportunity and capitalize on Microsoft Viva with the Avanade Nudge Platform. Nudge combines Teams with the Bot Framework and leading-edge behavioral science and AI to simplify everyday tasks as well as nudging individuals to focus on work that generates value. The platform also measures the employee experience to find the real moments that matter.
Cognizant
Partners like Cognizant, who guide organizations through digital transformations, have built solutions on Microsoft Teams to support the changing needs of customers. For instance, many organizations employ field technicians who travel to facilities to assess and resolve damages to equipment, but face challenges with access to tools and staying connected with each other. Cognizant is building a Damage Companion app built on Teams, Microsoft Power Platform, and SharePoint to have real-time communications with managers to triage and assess next steps, enabling accurate reporting and quicker asset recovery.
Cyclotron
With the widespread adoption of Microsoft Teams, partners like Cyclotron have seen increased demand for solutions that support customers changing work environments.
“We see Teams as a new cloud operating system or cloud shell that caters to any enterprise customers to build the next generation of cloud apps. These are a new breed of apps that can be built once and deployed to all the devices with a single code base.”—Amber Bahl, Founder, and CEO of Cyclotron
Building on Teams and the Microsoft technology stack, Cyclotron’s TeamsHub solution enables IT organizations with critical governance and compliance tools such as:
- Lifecycle management for Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive.
- Automated site provisioning and templates.
- Comprehensive reporting, tagging, and even PSTN number management.
- Manage security and compliance at a site and tenant-level and many more.
These are just a few examples of the innovative solutions our partners are building that enable transformation across the workplace.
We are excited to continue forging new paths in the evolution of the workplace and look forward to growing our relationships with all our partners in the many years to come.
Take these next steps
- See how Microsoft partners are making an impact in our State of the Partner Ecosystem address.
- Learn more on the partner opportunity for building innovative solutions in Microsoft Teams.
- Ready to build? Check out our Teams Developer Center to access the technical resources you need to get started.
1 Source: A commissioned Total Economic Impact study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft: Business Benefits and Cost Savings Enabled by Partner Applications for Microsoft Teams, March 2020.
