Microsoft Teams is benefiting from the video-calling boom.
Image: Microsoft

The rapid growth of Microsoft Teams shows no signs of slowing. During Microsoft’s FY21 Q1 earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Satya Nadella revealed that the company’s workplace collaboration platform now boasts more than 115 million daily active users — an increase of 53% since April 2020.

Teams use has boomed in recent months owing to the massive rise in remote working forced upon businesses by the coronavirus pandemic. The company has been locked in a tight battle with rival platform providers — most notably Zoom and Google Meet — both of which have been quick to step in to fill the void left by the (temporary) death of face-to-face meetings.

SEE: TechRepublic Premium editorial calendar: IT policies, checklists, toolkits, and research for download (TechRepublic Premium)

Zoom and Google Meet have also seen strong growth. Zoom’s most recent figures suggest the platform has 300 million daily meeting participants, compared to just 10 million in December 2019. Google Meet’s figures hover around 100 million participants logging into meetings every day.

Team’s figures are particularly impressive given that the platform reported having 75 million daily active users back in April, meaning Microsoft has added 40 million users over the course of six months.

It should be noted that ‘daily active users’ and ‘daily meeting participants’ aren’t the same thing: the first is a count of the number of unique individual users per day, whereas a ‘meeting participant’ can include someone who logs into several meetings in a day.

Teams owes much of its success to its tight integration with Microsoft’s other workplace-oriented software tools, notably Microsoft 365. According to Nadella, Microsoft 365 users generated more than 30 billion “collaboration minutes” in a single day during the most recent quarter.

“We are seeing increased usage intensity as people communicate, collaborate, and co-author content across work life and learning,” Nadella said. “Teams is the only solution with meetings, calls, chat, content collaboration, as well as business process workflow in a secure, integrated user experience. And as companies move online, they also want one unified platform for meetings to form systems, which Teams delivers.”

SEE: Top Windows 10 run commands (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Nadella also shed light on the rate at which new features were being added to Teams: more than 100 new capabilities were added over the past six months, including breakout rooms, Together mode, meeting recaps, Tasks in Teams, Lists, and even bigger meetings.

Wellbeing tools have also been a focus for Teams in recent months, and Nadella suggested this would be a priority for the platform going forward. “We are innovating with new experiences to help people prioritize wellbeing in the flow of work,” Microsoft’s CEO said.

“New Insights [in] Teams provides personalized recommendation, recommended actions, making it easier for employees to create healthy work habits and for leaders to build high-performing teams. New virtual commute gives structure to remote workday with scheduled cognitive breathers, and together mode is helping employees at companies like Office Depot review video fatigue.”

Overall, Microsoft revealed that revenue grew 12% in Q1 to $37.2 billion, while net income rose 30% to $13.9 billion.