Microsoft launches Viva to take on legacy intranet and disrupt the fragmented $300B employee experience platform market

As part of Microsoft’s effort to reimagine the fragmented $300 billion employee experience platform market, Microsoft on Thursday unveils Viva, a suite of apps to help people become more informed and avoid burnout. Viva provides online learning materials, internal announcements, an encyclopedia of corporate terms and tools.

Viva is a group of services initially accessible in the Microsoft Teams app to bring tools for employee engagement, learning, wellbeing, and knowledge discovery, directly into the flow of people’s work. The tech giant said the new platform is designed to help employees learn, grow and thrive, with new experiences that integrate with the productivity and collaboration capabilities in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.

The introduction of Viva could help Microsoft fortify its Office franchise, which delivers more revenue than any other product category for the company. It may also make Microsoft to stand out from competitors such as Slack, which Salesforce agreed to buy for $27.7 billion.

According to Microsoft. Viva aggregates all the learning resources available to an organization in one place, including content from LinkedIn Learning; Microsoft Learn; third-party providers including Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight and edX; as well as an organization’s own content library. From traditional learning courses to microlearning content, users can discover, share, assign and track a wide variety of learning as a natural part of the workday. The Viva Learning app is now available in private preview, and starting later this year Viva Learning will offer integrations with leading learning management systems, including Cornerstone OnDemand, Saba and SAP SuccessFactors.

“We have participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment the world has seen, and it has had a dramatic impact on the employee experience,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “Every organization will require a unified employee experience from onboarding and collaboration to continuous learning and growth. Viva brings together everything an employee needs to be successful, from day one, in a single, integrated experience directly in Teams.”

The announcement comes as economic and social trends are driving durable changes in workforce engagement. Amid the shift to an increasingly distributed and digital work environment, demand has grown for solutions that support corporate culture, knowledge discovery, on-the-job learning and employee wellbeing. Analysts size the nascent Employee Experience Platforms (EXP) category at $300 billion in annual spend. It spans what is today a fragmented market of services, infrastructure and hundreds of tools, many that go undiscovered and underutilized by employees at the companies that have invested in them.

“As the world of work changes, the next horizon of innovation will come from a focus on creativity, engagement and wellbeing so organizations can build cultures of resilience and ingenuity,” said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president, Microsoft 365. “Our vision is to deliver a platform for the employee experience that helps organizations create a thriving culture with engaged employees and inspiring leaders.”

Microsoft Viva builds on the power of Teams and Microsoft 365 to unify the employee experience across four key areas — Engagement, Wellbeing, Learning and Knowledge — in an integrated experience that empowers people to be their best. Today, Microsoft is announcing an initial set of modules in Viva that will provide built-in capabilities, integrations from a strong and growing ecosystem of Viva partners, and platform extensibility that will enable customers to integrate their existing employee experience systems and tools with Viva to make them more accessible and discoverable to employees.