Salesforce Closes $27.7-Billion Slack Acquisition, Aims to Connect Companies via the Workplace App

The merger partners hope the deal will bolster efforts to connect their joint customers to smooth out common business deals.

By Reuters | Updated: 22 July 2021 11:07 IST

Salesforce Closes $27.7-Billion Slack Acquisition, Aims to Connect Companies via the Workplace App

A Slack "channel" can be created to replace all the emails, phone calls, and video conferences

Highlights

Merger partners want to reduce complexity of using different apps
Analysts view Teams as Slack's largest rival
Slack will continue to integrate with the Microsoft app

Business software maker Salesforce closed its $27.7-billion (roughly Rs. 2,06,255 crores) purchase of Slack, a massive bet that the workplace app will become popular for collaborations within and between companies.

US antitrust regulators cleared the deal this week, allowing the creation of a stronger challenger to Microsoft, the top workplace software provider whose Teams app competes with Slack for market dominance.

The merger partners hope the deal will bolster efforts to connect their joint customers to smooth out common business deals, Salesforce President Bret Taylor and Slack Chief Executive Stewart Butterfield said in an interview on Wednesday.

Slack Work-Chat Service to Be Acquired by Salesforce in $27.7-Billion Deal

They also want to reduce the complexity of using hundreds of different cloud-based apps that have crept into workplaces, they added.

For example, a Slack "channel" can be created to replace all the emails, phone calls, and video conferences that might otherwise occur between a sales team doing a deal with a procurement team at another company. Thousands of apps work with Slack, so documents from third-party platforms like Google Drive can be signed in the channel with services like DocuSign, Taylor said.

"We did the due diligence for the Slack acquisition in Slack," Taylor noted.

Salesforce Leads $15-Million Investment in Indian HR Tech Platform Darwinbox

"I joked it had the highest billable hours of any channel ever, because we had all the lawyers in there and the investment banks," he said, but "it was really a transformative experience."

While analysts view Teams as Slack's largest rival, Butterfield said Slack will continue to integrate with the Microsoft app in line with its goal to make it easier for employees to get things done.

"What customers want is interoperability. They don't want to have to make hard choices," Butterfield said. "We'll integrate with everyone - Microsoft and Salesforce, of course, but also ServiceNow and Workday, and more or less anyone you can think of."

© Thomson Reuters 2021

The recently-concluded first season of Loki is our focus this week on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.

Affiliate links may be automatically generated - see our ethics statement for details.

Comments

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.