Facebook is ramping up its enterprise presence (FB)

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After becoming the biggest social and messaging platform globally, Facebook is working on expanding its presence in the enterprise space.

The company has long excelled in the consumer market — Facebook owns three of the top 10 apps with the highest reach in the US — but it lags on the enterprise side behind competing digital platforms from other players like Amazon, Google, and Apple.

Facebook has been reinforcing its existing enterprise-focused products and launching new ones:

Facebook announced plans to bring VR into the office with the Oculus for Business bundle at the Oculus Connect Conference last week. Oculus for Business aims to help more companies adopt VR by bundling it with additional hardware, enterprise-grade warranties, customer support, and a full VR commercial license. The new corporate initiative could increase uptake of VR by promising to boost productivity, accelerate trainings, and speed up routine processes for businesses.
It also released a beta version desktop app for Facebook Workplace Chat, an enterprise collaboration service that works across Mac and PC and competes with services like Slack. The desktop app, which is being tested by current Workplace users, will make the features and tools available via the Workplace browser version easier to use.
The company continues to disrupt business communications with Facebook Messenger. Turning Messenger into a business communications hub has been a major focus for Facebook, and one that’s paying off: There are already 18 million businesses exchanging more than 2 billion messages monthly with Messenger’s 1.3 billion monthly active users, according to Facebook Messenger VP David Marcus. As Messenger adds features and functionality that make the app better equipped to handle consumer queries, it could pull users away from traditional modes of business-to-consumer (B2C) interaction, including email and voice calls.

Facebook’s focus on businesses has been a long time coming, but it's entering a market already dominated by established tech players. For example, in terms of VR, Facebook is competing with HTC, Microsoft, and Google, as the Vive and Hololens are already competing in the enterprise segment, and soon, Google Glass will make its appearance. Facebook’s likely hopeful that its massive popularity with general consumers will help it catch on in the enterprise space, but to be successful among businesses, the company will need to differentiate its offerings from its competitors that are already excelling in the space.

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