This anonymised composite case study describes how a professional services firm cuts Slack and Webex overlap. It reflects the kind of engagement we run rather than a single named client, and no real organization, logo, or person is identified. The figures are illustrative of a typical outcome. It sits among our case studies and supports the wider digital workplace cost optimization program.
Situation
The organization was a professional services firm of around 900 employees across three offices, with a sprawling collaboration stack that had grown by department rather than by design. Most of the firm lived in Microsoft Teams, which came bundled with the Microsoft 365 licenses everyone already held. On top of that, several practice groups ran Slack for internal chat, and a legacy Webex contract persisted for video and conferencing, left over from an older arrangement nobody had revisited.
The overspend found
The review found the firm was paying in full for three overlapping ways to message and meet. Teams was already funded inside Microsoft 365 and used by nearly everyone. Slack duplicated the chat capability for a subset of teams, billed per active user. Webex duplicated the video and conferencing capability that Teams also provided, on a contract that auto renewed without review. In effect, the firm paid three times for two functions, and the duplication had never been examined because each tool had its own owner and its own renewal date.
Source: vendor plans and pricing documentation for Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Webex (microsoft.com, slack.com, webex.com), as of June 2026. Plan structures and pricing change often; confirm current terms before any consolidation decision.
Approach: how the firm cuts Slack and Webex overlap
The work followed the standardisation logic described in standardising on one collaboration platform. We measured real usage across all three tools to establish what each genuinely delivered, then confirmed that Microsoft Teams, already paid for, covered the messaging and meeting workflows the firm depended on. With that established, we named Teams the primary platform and planned the retirement of Slack and Webex around their respective notice periods, so neither could auto renew during the transition. The auto renewal risk on the Webex contract was exactly the kind we describe in the glossary entry on the auto renewal clause.
Migration was sequenced to protect the work. Active Slack channels that mattered were moved into Teams, Webex meeting habits were redirected to Teams meetings, and the change was communicated in spend terms leadership understood. Where a small group had a genuine external facing need, it was handled within Teams rather than by keeping a separate contract alive.
Outcome
The firm retired both the Slack and Webex contracts entirely, standardising on the Teams capability it already owned. Removing two recurring subscriptions, plus the support and administration overhead of running three platforms, cut the firm's collaboration tooling spend substantially, with the saving concentrated in contracts that were pure duplication of an owned tool. Because Teams was already embedded and the migration was planned around real usage, the change landed without disrupting client work.
| Tool | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Teams | Used widely, already paid for | Primary platform for chat and meetings |
| Slack | Paid per user for several teams | Retired, channels migrated to Teams |
| Webex | Legacy contract, auto renewing | Retired before next auto renewal |
| Collaboration tooling spend | Baseline across three tools | Reduced to the owned Teams capability |
Lessons for buyers
The first lesson is that overlap rarely arrives by decision, it accumulates by drift, with each tool justified on its own while the duplication goes unexamined. The second is that the cheapest collaboration platform is usually the one you already own, and counting what Microsoft 365 already provides is the fastest route to a real cut. The third is that timing matters: planning the retirements around notice periods stopped a legacy contract from auto renewing mid transition. Buyers who measure usage across every tool, standardise on what is already funded, and sequence the change around renewal dates can remove whole contracts rather than negotiating slightly smaller ones. This is the core of our collaboration rationalization work.