2 years of digital transformation in 2 months

This week, CEO Satya Nadella delivered Microsoft’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 Microsoft 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 combines 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 is playing to keep the world working and share customer stories about how Teams enables 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 one on the market that can release all three. The reason for that is simple: Teams is 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 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 auto boot, 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, Teams is 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, backs 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 end of January. And the number of daily active Teams users in China also continued to grow week over week.

Helping our customers

We are so inspired by the ingenuity and agility of our customers as they navigate the shift to remote work. Here are a few of their stories.

Accenture:
“Accenture is one of the largest users of Microsoft Teams in the world, and during this unprecedented crisis, it is proving to be invaluable—both for us and for helping our clients maintain business continuity and stay connected to their people and customers.”
—Julie Sweet, Chief Executive Officer, Accenture

Goodyear Tire Company:
“Our work from home experience has been nothing short of phenomenal. We were able to transition 25,000 associates to working from home in a matter of just a few days, and Teams played a vital role in that. This is evidenced by a tremendous increase in Teams usage, which includes a 410 percent increase in Teams meetings compared to a normal week. We have continued to work in the Goodyear way taking care of our customers and associates with integrity and conscientiousness, with Teams helping our associates stay connected to their work and each other.”
—Sherri Neubert, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Goodyear Tire Company

Guildford Technical Community College:
“We found ourselves faced with implementing a collaboration tool in a couple of days versus the original 90-120 days we had originally planned. Fortunately, we had begun testing and building out some of the basic functionality in Teams, but not to the extent to complete an enterprise rollout. COVID-19 entered the picture and we had no choice other than to roll out Teams to all faculty and staff at the college and to include classroom instruction among other things. Thanks to the MS “team,” pun intended, we were able to pull it off successfully and we are now working to enable additional functionality to the faculty, staff and students. Thank you so much for your responsiveness and willingness to help us during a very trying time, MS team! You folks rock!”
—Ron G Horn, Chief Information Officer, Guildford Technical Community College

Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust:
Consultant Medical Oncologist Jo Dent runs several clinics for cancer patients at the trust—many of them young women with busy lives, jobs, and children to look after. Previously, patients could choose from appointments at fixed times of the week and often travelled with their families for up to an hour for a five-minute check-up. Now, Dr. Dent can contact a patient using Teams at a time that suits them both. Dent says, “We can have a quick chat over video just so I can check that the treatment that I’ve prescribed is working how I would expect. It gives them the chance to drop the kids off at school and lets the appointment happen on their time, not our time. With Teams, we offer the patient the choice, and it’s less stressful for them.”
—Jo Dent, Consultant Medical Oncologist, Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust

In this era of remote everything, we have seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. Teams is 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.