2 years of digital transformation in 2 months

2 years of digital transformation in 2 months

This week, CEO Satya Nadella delivered office.com/setup’s quarterly earnings report to Wall Street—our first in the era of COVID-19. On the call, Satya shared some new numbers: In April, we saw more than 200 million office.com/setup Teams meeting participants in a single day, generating more than 4.1 billion meeting minutes. Also, Teams now has more than 75 million daily active users, and two-thirds of them have shared, collaborated, or interacted with files on Teams as well. As Satya put it, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. From remote teamwork and learning to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security—we are working alongside customers every day to help them adapt and stay open for business in a world of remote everything.”

To keep their teams connected in this world of remote everything, our customers need more than meetings or chat alone. Teams combine meetings, calls, chat, and collaboration into a single tool that preserves context and keeps everyone up to speed. Below, I dig into the role that Teams are playing to keep the world working and share customer stories about how Teams enable their work. But first, a bit more about those numbers.

About the numbers

Satya shared three important types of numbers in his call: daily meeting participants, daily meeting minutes, and daily active users. We see different vendors use these metrics in different ways, but we’re the only ones on the market that can release all three. The reason for that is simple: office.com/setup Teams are the only solution that offers chat, calls, meetings, and collaboration in one.

So how do we define each? Our daily meeting participants number is the aggregate number of people joining a meeting in a day—so if someone participates in five meetings in a day, they would be counted five times. Meanwhile, we measure daily meeting minutes by adding together the total time people spend in Teams meetings within a 24-hour period. For example, if two people are in the same 10-minute meeting, we count that as 20 meeting minutes. Finally, we define daily active users (DAU) as the count of unique users performing an intentional action in a 24-hour period in any of the office.com/setup Teams clients—desktop, mobile, or web. Intentional actions include sending or replying to a chat, joining a meeting, or opening a file in Teams. We don’t count passive actions like an autoboot, minimizing a screen, or closing the app. We also don’t count Skype Consumer or Skype for Business usage, since that’s a completely different app. Our DAU numbers are de-duped, meaning we only count each user once.

Powering the world’s work

Across education, government, healthcare, and business, office.com/setup Teams are powering collaboration for organizations of all sizes while meeting the highest standards of security and privacy. Around the world, more than 183,000 educational institutions use Teams. In the United Arab Emirates alone, over 350,000 students are relying on Teams for remote learning. On the business side, 20 organizations have more than 100,000 active users on Teams, including Continental AG, Ernst & Young, Pfizer, and SAP. Just last week, Accenture became the first organization to surpass half a million users, and we expanded our partnership with the NFL. We even collaborated with the League to help bring the first-ever virtual NFL Draft to life with Teams!

And after weeks of learning, working and living this way, we’re all developing new habits. Some COVID-19-era habits will prove temporal—I know many parents who can’t wait for the return of in-person play dates, for instance. But we believe the habits we see in Teams are more durable and will persist well beyond the current crisis. Data from regions like China and South Korea, where many people have returned to the office, but continue Teams habits they developed while working apart, back this up. For example, a report out this month showed more than two times the number of new Teams users each day in China compared to the end of January. And the number of daily active Teams users in China also continued to grow week over week.

In this era of remote everything, we have seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. Teams are enabling this accelerated transformation by giving people a single tool to chat, call, meet, and collaborate. With Teams as their hub for teamwork, our customers are discovering new collaboration habits that we believe will persist well beyond this crisis. We are committed to continuing to build the tools that keep them connected and productive—through COVID-19 and beyond.