Slack, the $3.8 billion cloud-based team collaboration tool, has launched Slack Enterprise Grid, aimed at helping companies administer and connect multiple chat instances. Slack made the big announcement this week in San Francisco.

Slack's New Product Targets Big Enterprise Companies

According to The Verge, Enterprise Grid is a new cloud-based application that designed to help its software scale to big companies or organizations with tens of thousands of employees. It is Slack's latest salvo to the enterprise market and it is primarily designed for large companies.

Enterprise Grid will allow workers to communicate better between different organizations within the enterprise. Slack says the new tool allows IT admins to set up each team inside their organization with their own centrally managed Slack instance.The workspaces can then be linked together using shared channels.

Slack also claims that all of the workers inside an enterprise can also message one another, even if the users are not part of the same workspace.

Additionally, Slack has also integrated the Enterprise Grid with a team of 10 companies' eDiscovery and Digital Loss Prevention systems. The cloud-based startup also previewed a series of upcoming search improvements, hinting a more robust universal search.

In addition to the search improvements, Slack also announced plans to integrate Tact, the AI-powered sales tool that uses smart software to simplify sales tasks, to the newly launched Enterprise Grid.

According to TechCrunch, the AI tool will give users the ability to access enterprise programs and data repositories without leaving Slack.

As for the release date and pricing, Slack has not yet announced pricing, but analysts have some price estimates. They expect to go much higher than the company's Plus plan, that is $12.50 per user per month if paid annually.

TechCrunch also reported that starting Tuesday, interested parties may now reach out to Slack to set up a demo of the new enterprise tool and eventually start a discussion for a possible deployment.

Enterprise Grid already rolled out in beta with dozens of enterprise companies on board, including Capital One, IBM, and PayPal.

Enterprise Grid May Put The Company In Direct Competition With Microsoft Teams

Slack was originally built for small businesses, but moving into the highly competitive enterprise market may be the future for Slack's business. Unfortunately, this would not be easy for them, because of the new threat posed by Microsoft, which has recently launched a Slack competitor, the Microsoft Teams.

Some analysts believe that Microsoft Teams has a huge advantage in this upcoming face off because it is deeply integrated with the Microsoft Office 365 productivity suite, which is commonly used in many enterprises.