Kyle Vikstrom, Director of Microsoft Investor Relations, shared the new Teams usage number with me ahead of the Q4 FY21 analyst call. The new metric Microsoft now is using is monthly, not daily, active users.
On Microsoft’s earnings call, officials said that Microsoft has nearly 80 million monthly active Teams Phone users. They added that 124 organizations now have more than 100,000 users of Teams and nearly 3,000 have more than 10,000 users.
In April 2020, Microsoft was at 75 million daily active users with Teams. Microsoft officials have said the rapid growth of the product is in large part fueled by the need for remote work during the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
Teams is part of Microsoft’s “Commercial cloud” category and also is part of its office commercial products and cloud services revenue category. Teams began as a group-chat platform but Microsoft has been turning it into an almost operating-system-like product over time by extending its capabilities and features. Microsoft officials said “commercial cloud” revenues – Office 365, Azure, Dynamics 365 and other cloud services – hit $19.5 billion in Q4, compared to $14.3 billion a year ago.
Microsoft is trying to grow Teams beyond its established business base by adding consumer features to the product. Microsoft is integrating a Teams Chat button into the Windows 11 taskbar in the hopes of getting more people to try Teams’ consumer capabilities.
