Salesforce to acquire Slack for $27.7 billion
Salesforce, a provider of CRM software, and Slack Technologies, provider of a business communication/collaboration platform, have entered into a definitive agreement under which Salesforce will acquire Slack for approximately $27.7 billion.
Slack, whose open platform integrates with more than 2,400 apps for collaboration and communication, serves organizations around the world, from startups to Fortune 500 companies, such as Starbucks, Target, and TD Ameritrade, along with academic institutions, non-profits, and governments in more than 150 countries.
Describing the impetus for the acquisition, Salesforce said the events of this year have strongly accelerated the move by companies and governments to an all-digital world, where work happens wherever people are—whether they’re in the office, at home, or somewhere in between. As a result, they need to deliver connected experiences for their customers across every touchpoint and enable their employees to work seamlessly wherever they are. The combination of Salesforce and Slack will provide companies with a unified platform for connecting employees, customers, and partners with each other and the apps they use every day, all within their existing workflows.
Industry leaders were quick to comment on the deal and it's broader implications for the collaboration/engagement/messaging tools market.
“Salesforce acquiring Slack is a bold move in their ongoing competition with Microsoft and specifically Microsoft Teams, their platform bet for integrated workforce collaboration and productivity. Slack extends Salesforce capabilities beyond their leading customer relationship management platform into modern collaboration capabilities that will appeal to sellers, marketers, developers, and other departments across many organizations," said Dustin Grosse, chief marketing and strategy officer at Nintex, a Salesforce partner. "Remote working has become increasingly important due to COVID-19 this year and additional real-time communications solutions choices will accelerate how organizations collaborate to solve customer challenges." Grosse added that it will be interesting to see how Salesforce's key competitors such as Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP respond to this acquisition. I suspect that low-code digital process automation solutions to drive stronger interoperation between key systems of records like CRM, ERP, HRM, and unified collaboration platforms—like Slack and Teams—will be the next focus area to further improve work by eliminating paper and siloed data systems to streamline and digitally transform how work gets done.”
“SaaS is being adopted faster than ever to drive employee effectiveness, especially as it relates to customer experience. Salesforce's acquisition of Slack brings together employees and customers in a single collaborative experience, which is exactly what’s driving the adoption of new SaaS applications,: said Eric Christopher, co-founder and CEO of Zylo, provider of an enterprise SaaS management platform. "The challenge for companies now is to understand what they’ve invested in and whether those applications are being used to improve experience and effectiveness. They want to move from silos to integrated experiences and a central way to manage their growing portfolio of SaaS apps. Just as COVID accelerated the adoption of SaaS for the digital workforce, this move will accelerate the move toward centralization of collaboration, experience, and management. It will force the giants in both customer and employee engagement—Microsoft, Google, Amazon—to respond.”
According to Salesforce, Slack will be deeply integrated into every Salesforce Cloud, and, as the new interface for Salesforce Customer 360, Slack will transform how people communicate, collaborate and take action on customer information across Salesforce as well as information from all of their other business apps and systems to be more productive, make smarter, faster decisions, and create connected customer experiences.
Under the terms of the agreement, Slack shareholders will receive $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of Salesforce common stock for each Slack share, which represents an enterprise value of approximately $27.7 billion based on the closing price of Salesforce’s common stock on November 30, 2020.
The transaction is anticipated to close in the second quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2022, subject to approval by the Slack stockholders, the receipt of required regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.
For more information, go to www.salesforce.com.