Salesforce Completes Slack Acquisition to Power the Future of Work

CRM leader Salesforce has now officially completed its Slack acquisition, nearly eight months after announcing its plans to acquire the enterprise collaboration platform for a whopping $27.7 billion.

The Slack acquisition comes at a time when the collaborative apps are enjoying a boom time in a pandemic-driven world, where work-from-anywhere has become the norm. Collaboration apps such as Microsoft’s Teams, Slack, Google Workspace, Zoom, and many others are competing with one another to grab a slice of this market.

Salesforce has thrived for years as a niche business-software vendor. With the Slack acquisition Salesforce too aims to enter the work-from-anywhere domain and both the companies perhaps can play a big part in powering the future of work.

Slack said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on July 16 that the U.S. Department of Justice had closed its antitrust investigation into the acquisition.

“Together we’ll define the future of enterprise software, creating the digital HQ that enables every organization to deliver customer and employee success from anywhere,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement.

“We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink and reshape how and where we work,” said Stewart Butterfield, Slack CEO and Co-Founder. “Salesforce and Slack are uniquely positioned to lead this historic shift to a digital-first world. I could not be more excited for what’s to come.”

Commenting on the deal, Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEO of IBM said, “We are obsessed with continually delighting our clients and offering them the best experience and value across every interaction. Salesforce and Slack coming together will help us become more connected, more productive, and more innovative so we can better serve our clients.”

Recently, IBM partnered with Salesforce to help businesses, schools and governments as they strive to reopen safely in the wake of the pandemic.

“We’ve learned over the past year that the workplace isn’t snapping back to the way it was,” said Bret Taylor, President and Chief Operating Officer of Salesforce.

“Together, Slack and Salesforce Customer 360 will give every company in the world a single source of truth for their business and a single platform for connecting employees, customers, and partners with each other and the apps they use every day,” he said.

The combination of Salesforce and Slack also brings together two of the software industry’s most dynamic communities, creating an open and extensive ecosystem that will deliver the next generation of digital-first apps and workflows for business.

“Salesforce will create a modern workspace that enables collaboration, communities, communications, CRM functionality, customer experience, and AI in an ecosystem that will welcome other integrations to extend enterprise functionality,” said Wayne Kurtzman, IDC Research Director for Social, Communities, and Collaboration.

Salesforce and Slack are already making a huge difference. IBM’s 380,000 employees are working together in Slack, with numerous workflows across Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud powering customer success across locations and time zones.

As part of Salesforce, Slack will be positioned to accelerate and extend its mission to make work life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. Slack will continue to operate under the Slack brand, driving forward a continued focus on its mission, customers, and community. CEO and Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield will continue to head Slack.

In the last year and a half, companies have increasingly used digital means to connect with employees, customers, and partners, every business—in every industry—are left with little choice but to optimize for a digital-first customer, employee, and partner experience.

Meanwhile, rhe global Enterprise Collaboration Market size is expected to grow from $47.2 billion in 2021 to $85.8 billion by 2026 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.7% during the forecast period.

The Covid-19 global pandemic offers a great opportunity to rethink and reshape everything about how and where we work. That’s exactly what the combination of Salesforce and Slack is all about—creating the business operating system for the new world of work.