On December 1, 2020, Salesforce, a software multinational headquartered in California, broke the news of buying Slack, a collaboration software-maker, for an estimated amount of USD 27.7 billion.
On the solutions front, Salesforce offers a comprehensive range of hosted CRM (Customer Relationship Management) services to enterprises to enable marketing and business operations.
With this brand-new purchase, Salesforce plans to strategically add Slack to its Salesforce Cloud operations. Basis the announcement, the new acquisition by the company will specifically serve as “the new interface for Salesforce Customer 360.”
The incorporation is expected to create an “operating system for the new way to work” with Slack offering an open platform that operates with over 2,400 apps.
Additionally, the announcement states, “Together, Salesforce and Slack will create the most extensive open ecosystem of apps and workflows for business and empower millions of developers to build the next generation of apps, with clicks not code.”
The deal status
The purchase deal is pending regulatory approvals and is expected to close by 2022, in Salesforce’s second fiscal quarter. Once the deal is closed, Slack will run as a Salesforce operating unit and will be lead and headed by Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield.
Butterfield, in a statement, mentioned, “Personally, I believe this is the most strategic combination in the history of software, and I can’t wait to get going.”
Salesforce and Slack can be considered natural allies as both these entities have Microsoft as their major competitor. At times, they have been pushed back verbally at inroads made by Microsoft into their product areas, with products such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Teams solutions.
