A CANADIAN software company, valued at £3 billion has offered hope it could expand its operations into Northern Ireland.
Speaking at the Digital DNA conference, held in Belfast last week, James Sherrett, senior technologist at Slack, said the city was very much in the firm's thoughts going forward.
Founded in 2013 by the team behind photo sharing website Flickr, Slack (Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge) is a messaging platform for teams that brings all communications together, including social media, eliminating the need for internal work emails.
Already it has five million daily users within businesses and organisations around the world.
Originally a gaming company,Slack has grown to a major communications player employing 800 people, working with multi-nationals such as Marks and Spencer, Sky and Ocado in the UK and with offices in San Francisco,Toronto, New York, Melbourne, London and Dublin.
A key note speaker at the Digital DNA conference Mr Sherrett told the Irish News he believes the Slack template will eventually render office emails obsolete, with huge uptake across the world since the messaging platform was launched.
"We believe the move from internal based systems or communications based on email to something like Slack or Slack itself is inevitable and that different companies and organisations are at different stages of awareness. It's actually been a delight to encounter people here (in Belfast) who come up and say we use Slack and we love it and we would never go back."
Looking to the future Mr Sherrett explained that the company, last valued at £3 billion, will open a Japanese office later this year, but Belfast, due to its skilled workforce, was a viable location in the future.
The UK is currently the company's second biggest market, with firms in the north already using the service, being served by the London office, which opened just last month.
"It's been a terrific delight to meet some of the talented folk in Northern Ireland," he said.
"We don't have any plans for any additional offices at this stage, but I think probably if we thought about where our next sequence of offices would be it would be Germany, maybe the Nordic countries, maybe France and then Northern Ireland, Belfast in particular. I know some of our customers already have offices in places like Derry, in Belfast and rave about the talent."
