Companies spent years adding new workplace apps. Now they are asking which ones are important enough to keep. Zoom and Box report after Tuesday’s close, giving you a fresh look at the software platforms trying to survive that consolidation.
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Theme: Workplace Software, Collaboration, Cloud Content, Productivity, Vendor Consolidation, and AI
More Software Is Not Always Better
The cloud software boom created a strange problem.
Companies gained access to better tools, but they also accumulated a lot of them.
Video meetings might happen in one platform. Documents live somewhere else. Projects are managed in another. Contracts require another subscription. Internal communication happens somewhere else again.
Eventually, somebody in finance asks a dangerous question:
Do we really need all of these?
That makes the next stage of workplace software less about simply adding users and more about becoming difficult to remove.
Platforms Have an Advantage
A product that solves one narrow problem can be useful.
A platform that handles five problems can become embedded.
Zoom is expanding beyond meetings into phone, contact centers, productivity tools, and AI. Box is moving beyond file storage into content management and automated workflows.
Atlassian, DocuSign, and Microsoft are pushing in similar directions.
The goal is increasingly clear:
Own more of the employee’s workday.
What’s Driving It
Zoom Has to Prove There Is Life After Meetings
Zoom reports fiscal Q2 results after Tuesday’s close, with its earnings webinar scheduled for 5:00 p.m. ET.
The company entered the quarter with revenue growth finally showing signs of improvement.
Fiscal Q1 revenue increased 5.5% to $1.239 billion, while Enterprise revenue grew 7.2%. Zoom ended the quarter with 4,534 customers generating more than $100,000 in trailing 12-month revenue, up 8.2% year over year.
Those are not hypergrowth numbers.
But that is no longer the point.
Zoom is trying to prove it can turn a mature meeting product into a broader workplace platform.
Profitability Gives Zoom Time
The strongest part of Zoom’s story may actually be its economics.
Q1 GAAP operating margin reached 25.1%, up 450 basis points from a year earlier. Non-GAAP operating margin was 41.1%, while free cash flow reached $500.5 million.
That gives management room to invest.
The question is whether those investments create another meaningful growth engine.
Zoom said paid AI Companion users increased 184% year over year, while newer products such as Customer Experience continued growing rapidly.
Tuesday gives us another test of whether customers are actually paying Zoom for more than meetings.
Box Is Trying to Escape File Storage
Box reports fiscal Q2 results after Tuesday’s close as well, followed by its call at 5:00 p.m. ET.
This may be the more interesting transformation story.
Box used to be easy to explain as cloud storage.
Today, management wants it viewed as an intelligent content platform where companies store documents, secure them, automate workflows, search them, and connect them with AI tools.
Fiscal Q1 revenue increased 11% to $306 million, while remaining performance obligations reached roughly $1.6 billion, up 12%. Non-GAAP operating margin reached 27.7%.
That combination matters.
Growth accelerated while profitability remained healthy.
Atlassian Shows What Stronger Growth Looks Like
Atlassian gives us a useful benchmark for what a successful workplace platform can look like.
Its latest quarterly revenue increased 28% to $1.77 billion, while cloud revenue jumped 31%.
Subscription ARR reached $6.61 billion, up 23%, and remaining performance obligations increased 44% to $4.82 billion.
Atlassian has expanded from software development tools to project management, service management, collaboration, and AI-assisted workflows.
That is exactly the direction many smaller workplace software companies want to travel.
The Chain Reaction
Companies add more software → subscription costs rise
IT departments review spending → overlapping tools get questioned
Customers consolidate vendors → weaker point solutions lose seats
Winning platforms add more products → revenue per customer increases
More workflows stay inside one ecosystem → switching gets harder
Customers resist new AI pricing → expected growth fails to arrive
What’s Working
Mature Software Can Still Be Very Profitable
Zoom is the clearest example.
Revenue is growing far more slowly than during the pandemic, yet margins and free cash flow remain exceptional.
DocuSign tells a similar story.
Fiscal Q1 revenue increased 9% to $830.2 million, while free cash flow climbed to $289.4 million from $227.8 million a year earlier.
Slow growth does not automatically mean bad business.
For you, the more important question is whether a mature software company can use its cash generation to create a second growth act.
AI Has to Become a Product
Nearly every workplace software company now talks about AI.
That does not mean every company will make money from it.
Microsoft gives us the scale benchmark.
Its fiscal Q4 Productivity and Business Processes revenue increased 14% to $37.8 billion, while Microsoft 365 Commercial cloud revenue grew 14% on a reported basis.
For the full fiscal year, Microsoft said Microsoft 365 Commercial cloud revenue grew 17%, helped by higher revenue per user from products including Copilot.
That is the standard.
AI features have to increase pricing, retention, usage, or customer spending.
Otherwise, they are just expensive features.
What to Watch
Zoom Needs Better Expansion
Zoom’s trailing 12-month Enterprise net dollar expansion rate reached 99% last quarter.
That was slightly better than the previous year, but it still means the average existing customer was not meaningfully increasing spending.
Watch whether expansion finally moves above 100%.
If Zoom can sell more products into its installed customer base, that number should improve.
Box Needs Growth to Stay Accelerated
Box entered Q2 guiding for roughly $319 million of revenue, around 9% year-over-year growth, alongside a non-GAAP operating margin of approximately 28.5%.
Watch revenue growth, billings, RPO, Enterprise Advanced adoption, operating margins, and full-year guidance.
The key question is whether newer workflow and AI products are genuinely making Box more valuable to customers.
Zoom Communications (ZM)
What it does: Zoom provides video meetings, phone, contact-center software, collaboration tools, and AI-powered workplace products.
Why it fits: This is Tuesday’s most recognizable direct catalyst.
What stands out: Revenue growth is modest, but margins and free cash flow remain unusually strong. Zoom also has a massive installed customer base it can try to sell more products into.
What to watch: Enterprise growth, net dollar expansion, AI monetization, contact-center growth, margins, and guidance.
The Takeaway: Buy this if you want the cash-rich turnaround play trying to prove Zoom can become more than a meeting app. The risk is that customers like Zoom but do not spend much more with it.
Box (BOX)
What it does: Box provides cloud content management, document security, collaboration, and workflow automation.
Why it fits: It gives you a second direct Tuesday catalyst with a different part of the workplace stack.
What stands out: Q1 revenue grew 11% and RPO reached about $1.6 billion as Box pushed deeper into intelligent content management.
What to watch: RPO, billings, Enterprise Advanced adoption, AI products, margins, and guidance.
The Takeaway: Buy this if you want the smaller platform trying to turn corporate documents into a much larger workflow business. The risk is that Microsoft and other large platforms bundle enough similar functionality to limit Box’s growth.
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Atlassian (TEAM)
What it does: Atlassian owns Jira, Confluence, Loom, and other collaboration and workflow products.
Why it fits: It shows what stronger platform expansion can look like.
What stands out: Latest-quarter revenue increased 28%, cloud revenue grew 31%, and RPO jumped 44%.
What to watch: Cloud growth, enterprise customers, AI adoption, margins, and cross-selling.
The Takeaway: Buy this if you want the higher-growth platform in the basket. The risk is that expectations remain high after a strong year.
DocuSign (DOCU)
What it does: DocuSign provides electronic signatures and increasingly broader agreement-management software.
Why it fits: It faces the same challenge as Zoom: turn a famous single-purpose product into a wider platform.
What stands out: Q1 revenue increased 9%, while its Intelligent Agreement Management platform represented 12.6% of ARR, up from 10.8% one quarter earlier.
What to watch: IAM adoption, ARR growth, free cash flow, customer retention, and operating margins.
The Takeaway: Buy this if you want another mature software company showing signs that its second act is gaining traction. The risk is that electronic signatures remain the product customers really care about.
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Poll: "Supply chain reshoring" has been the investment theme of the last 3 years. When does it actually show up in U.S. GDP data in a way that's impossible to ignore?
- It already has — look at nonresidential construction spending data for semiconductor and EV plants
- 2026–2027 — the factories being built now start ramping production in the next 18–30 months
- Never — the labor cost differential with Asia is too large to overcome structurally
- Reshoring is mostly narrative; the real beneficiary is Mexico and near-shoring, not the U.S.
Microsoft (MSFT)
What it does: Microsoft owns the dominant workplace software ecosystem through Microsoft 365, Teams, Copilot, Dynamics, and other products.
Why it fits: This is the competitor everyone else in the basket has to think about.
What stands out: Microsoft 365 Commercial cloud revenue grew 17% for fiscal 2026, supported partly by higher revenue per user from Copilot and E5.
What to watch: Copilot adoption, Microsoft 365 pricing, seat growth, margins, and how aggressively Microsoft bundles new tools.
The Takeaway: Buy this if you want the platform most capable of consolidating workplace software spending onto itself.
The risk is simply that the workplace-software theme represents only one piece of an enormous company.
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Being Useful Is Not Enough
The first cloud software boom was about finding a problem and building an app to solve it.
The next one looks harder.
Zoom wants meetings to lead into communications and customer service. Box wants storage to lead into content workflows. DocuSign wants signatures to lead into agreement management. Atlassian keeps adding more of the workday to its ecosystem, while Microsoft can bundle an enormous amount of functionality together.
For you, that makes the next software question much simpler:
Which apps are useful, and which ones are important enough that companies cannot afford to remove them?
Best Regards,
— Adam Garcia
Elite Trade Club
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