
In May, Slack CEO Steward Butterfield said that “Microsoft is perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with killing us, and Teams is the vehicle to do that”. Launched in 2017, the application has also seen a surge in users during the pandemic. Meanwhile, Slack has faced stiff competition from Microsoft’s own business communication platform, Microsoft Teams.
SALESFORCE SLACK PROFESSIONAL
In 2016, Salesforce lost out to Microsoft in a bid to acquire professional social network LinkedIn.
SALESFORCE SLACK SOFTWARE
Salesforce and Microsoft have been driving forces in the industry’s largest software acquisitions and both were pioneers of the SaaS model. And both firms have a mutual rival – Microsoft. Uniting Salesforce and Slack has advantages for both companies in the fiercely competitive enterprise software market. This deal will help Slack sell into those companies.” A common rival

He adds that “these knowledge workers are used to complex tools and their IT teams regularly spend money on expensive software. He says that Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack “makes sense for large companies with high numbers of desk-bound employees”. Joining forces with Salesforce will provide new opportunities to monetise Slack and cross-sell, says Karandeep Anand, head of Workplace from Facebook.

“Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack would provide the company the much-needed support to continue adding enterprise customers,” says Sapana Maheria, practice head of thematic research at GlobalData, an analytics company that predicted Salesforce would acquire Slack back in April. Being acquired by Salesforce removes much of this pressure and provides other opportunities in the process. Some had questioned whether the company could ever become profitable if it couldn’t do so at a time when user numbers have risen so dramatically. The company operates with a freemium model, with paying subscribers getting additional features such as the ability to automate repetitive tasks in Slack workflows. However, Slack has struggled to convert its success into profits. Many companies that used it for the first time this year are likely to continue doing so beyond the pandemic and Salesforce’s investment is a big bet on this future. This helps to futureproof Slack’s appeal. In the third quarter, Slack added 12,000 net new paid customers – up 140% year over year.Īnd even as promising vaccines look set to allow offices to fully reopen next year, many are expecting remote working to remain for the long term.


Since then its popularity has continued to soar. Slack use surged when much of the world went into lockdown in March, adding 2.5 million simultaneously connected users in just 16 days. As such, employees have become more dependent on collaboration tools to carry out their jobs, driving up the use of tools like Slack and Zoom. The way we work – increasingly digital and in distributed teams untethered from the office – has been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic. This is a new ‘operating system’ for how knowledge workers will interact in the future, connecting the front office, back office, and customers all together in a single platform,” says Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO at content management company Box, in a blog post. In its latest financial results, Salesforce generated total revenues of $7.3 billion, an increase of 26% year-on-year and the company said it expects a contribution of $1.5 billion in sales from Slack in its 2023 fiscal year.“This isn’t just about the future of collaboration. Since acquiring Slack, Salesforce has continued to benefit financially from the ongoing popularity of the messaging platform. “We’ve done this by delivering real-time insights from systems of record like Salesforce to systems of engagement like Slack, bringing together information and actions that customer-facing teams need to close new deals and support existing customers.” “We’ve been a leader in the industry, working with some of the fastest-growing companies in the world, including Salesforce and Slack,” Troops’ CEO and co-founder Dan Reich wrote in a blog post. Founded in New York in 2016, Troops aims to help streamline the data management process and provide users with real-time insights surfaced from "systems of record" like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Zendesk, into "systems of engagement" like Slack, and Microsoft Teams using software bots.
