The 12 fastest-growing apps in business
From email management and recruiting to collaboration and project management, the list of services available to businesses through apps today seems almost endless. At Okta, we have some unique insight into what businesses choose to turn to, as organisations use our service to securely connect their people to technology. Here are thr fastest growing apps in our network in 2015, and which you’ll likely see more of in coming months.
1. Slack
It might as well be the Usain Bolt of enterprise apps, with its customer base in our network growing by 667 per cent in 2015. Chief executive Stewart Butterfield would tell you that’s because it’s more than just a corporate messaging platform. With its clean interface and collection of integrations – including GitHub, Google Drive and Trello – Slack enables teams to collaborate by providing all the information they need.
2. Greenhouse
This app was the fastest-growing recruiting solution in our network, with its usage across Okta’s customer base growing by 580 per cent between November 2014 and November 2015. It offers the tools companies need to manage the entire hiring process, which likely plays a role in its popularity.
3. Envoy
The use of Envoy grew by 233 per cent in our network. The app helps companies manage people coming in and out of their offices, making the visitor sign-in process more efficient and secure. We use Envoy at our front desk and so do Airbnb, Box, and Yahoo.
4. Zapier
This app is gaining traction by providing an easy way to integrate complementary applications and automate processes, such as emailing tasks to Wunderlist and transferring documents from Evernote to Dropbox.
5. BambooHR
The growth of BambooHR and Greenhouse prove that recruiting apps are on the rise. BambooHR provides employee information in a single view so teams can easily access, organise, analyse, and control data.
6. Wrike
This work management and collaboration platform gives users full visibility and control over their tasks. It was the fastest-growing project management tool in our network in 2015, growing by 205 per cent across our customer base.
7. Lucidchart
This app helps users sketch and share professional flowchart diagrams, providing designs for anything from brainstorming to project management. Not only is it another app on the rise in our network, it’s the one I used to draw some of the original architecture and product sketches for Okta.
8. Tableau
This product helps people see and understand data and is clearly resonating with businesses. Its data visualisation application, which gives users the ability to see patterns and trends without any scripts, continues to be popular. Incidentally, we used Tableau to pull data for this article.
9. Mimecast
An app that specialises in email management for Microsoft Exchange and Office 365. Mimecast offers security, archiving, and continuity cloud services to protect your business email. Considering Microsoft Office 365 is the number one app in our network overall, it’s no surprise that it is one of our fastest-growing.
10. SendGrid
Another app that you may see more of in the office this year, SendGrid focuses on email delivery. Its platform makes it easy for developers and marketers to craft, test, and deliver every form of email communication.
11. Lynda.com
This app has grown substantially in our network following its acquisition by LinkedIn. The online education provider offers thousands of video courses, covering business, software, and creative skills, making it popular with business professionals.
12. PagerDuty
The last on our list is PagerDuty’s incident resolution application. It goes beyond helping its users respond to incidents, connecting them to their monitoring systems so they can collect events, identify what’s important, and resolve critical issues to proactively manage their uptime.