Salesforce has bought Slack for nearly $27.7 billion. The large software and cloud services company is buying one of the world’s leading communications platforms for teams. The union of Salesforce and Slack is one of the most important purchases in the world of software in recent years and puts them on a par with companies like Google or Microsoft, with whom they will compete directly.
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As announced, “Slack shareholders will receive $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of Salesforce common stock for each Slack share, representing an enterprise value of approximately $27.7 billion based on the closing price of Salesforce’s common stock on November 30, 2020.”
The CRM and cloud computing giant needed a recognizable interface to keep growing and with Slack, they found it. It’s the missing leg to complete the business they are offering. It is important to be able to compete against the major technology giants not only in cloud operating services but also against Teams and the respective communication applications.
The idea behind this integration of Slack into Salesforce is to provide “a unified platform for connecting employees, customers and partners with each other and the apps they use every day, all within their existing workflows.” They indicate that Slack will essentially be the Salesforce Customer 360 interface, they highlight a large number of applications that Slack can connect (over 2400) through its platform, something they hope to leverage in the Salesforce cloud.
This isn’t the first major Salesforce purchase in recent years. In 2018 it bought MuleSoft for $6.5 billion and in 2019 they announced the purchase of Tableau for $15.3 billion, a data visualization company.
Salesforce already had its own communication tool, called Salesforce Chatter. But in quality, it’s far beyond what Slack offers. For the office automation part, Salesforce bought Quip in 2016. At the moment, it is not known how this purchase will affect the different services. It is a matter of curiosity if it will affect prices or if they will end up closing or merging tools to create a more solid package for companies and users.
With the purchase of Slack, Salesforce will also be involved in its legal battle with Microsoft. Following Slack’s complaint, the European Commission is investigating whether Microsoft “illegally linked Teams and Suite to boost their use among business customers.”
Slack’s latest moves were aimed at enhancing the social aspect of the application, from stories to create a kind of short video conferences, Discord style audio notes, and what they called Connect DMs, to communicate with people outside the organization, as an email.
As you might anticipate, Slack has the ingredients to become a direct rival to Google, Facebook or Microsoft. But they simply didn’t have the strength to cover so many battlefields. Now with Salesforce, Slack can accelerate his growth to become a leader in professional and team communication.
