Amazon Web Services passes Google on most popular list

SEATTLE – In some corners of the high-tech workplace, Amazon.com is more popular than Google.

Services built by Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud-computing division, were the fourth most popular workplace web application in November, up one spot from a year earlier.

That’s according to Okta, a San Francisco company whose products help companies manage employee access to web apps. Okta’s data covers its thousands of customers, and the company’s gauge offers a periodic snapshot of the winners and losers in the business of selling software that powers the workplace.

The growth in Amazon Web Services, or AWS, comes as more companies turn to cloud computing, or using rented computing power and data storage to manage their technology. AWS’s web-based tools include databases, developer tools and other software to manage websites and other technology infrastructure,

In the latest Okta rankings, AWS edged out Google’s G Suite email and office tools, which came in at No. 5.

Microsoft’s Office 365 remained the No. 1 app among Okta’s customers, followed by sales and marketing software maker Saleforce.com, and data storage company Box.

Elsewhere, the news wasn’t so good for Microsoft.

Slack, the chat service focused on workplace groups, continued to surge at the expense of Microsoft’s Skype chat service and Yammer social network.

Slack was the eighth most popular application in Okta’s data.

Skype stood at the 60th place, down from 32nd two years earlier. Yammer checked in at No. 50, from 17th in 2014.

Microsoft has fired back at Slack, in November introducing a look-alike product called Microsoft Teams that lives within the company’s Office 365 productivity suite.

The Okta data also adds to the evidence that growth at Tableau, the Seattle data visualization software company, is slowing.

Use of Tableau among Okta’s customers was up 33 percent from a year ago. Last year the growth rate was 65 percent.