Salesforce is arming itself. It has just agreed on the largest transaction in history – from February 2021, the purchase of Slack, the communicator for collective work, will become a reality. So far, the record of Marc Benioff, CEO of SF, has been the acquisition of Tableau data analysis platform for $ 15 billion. This time the amount will exceed USD 27 billion.
Slack is a powerful messenger for members of small and medium-sized enterprises, that has become one of the most popular platforms for remote collaboration. It includes chat, the ability to work on shared files, create closed and public channels and a search engine for content shared by colleagues.
Outgoing CEO of Slack, Stewart Butterfield will be able to continue managing Slack as a Salesforce unit.
“Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world” said Benioff.
All this makes the fight for software primacy between Microsoft and Salesforce exciting in the coming years. Both enterprises seem to follow a similar course, aiming to be suppliers of the full spectrum of software from data storage to video communication.
It is worth noting, that not all Salesforce purchasing decisions were correct. In 2016, the company bought Quip Inc., a producer of an environment for teamwork on documents and spreadsheets, for over USD 500 million. According to analysts, the product – like the Chatter social network previously integrated with Salesforce – did not achieve the expected success.
Microsoft also did not waste time – as part of the MS 365 business environment, organizations can use the Teams platform, which competes with Slack and has grown into a leader among such solutions in recent months. What makes the competition even more spicy is the fact, that both giants have agreed on the integration of SF with Teams, which we wrote about in this article.
What significance will the acquisition of Slack have for Salesforce users? Although companies manage the details quite sparingly, you can guess, that the combination of both environments will be an extremely extensive, open ecosystem of applications for business and will allow millions of developers to create next-generation applications with clicks, not code.
Marcin Kapuściński – Transition Technologies MS S.A.