{"id":41618,"date":"2020-12-02T11:44:21","date_gmt":"2020-12-02T11:44:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/?guid=9acdc00dc535d4952ba14ef3f40f212a"},"modified":"2020-12-02T11:44:21","modified_gmt":"2020-12-02T11:44:21","slug":"salesforce-escalates-microsoft-rivalry-with-20-7bn-slack-acquisition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/salesforce-escalates-microsoft-rivalry-with-20-7bn-slack-acquisition\/","title":{"rendered":"Salesforce escalates Microsoft rivalry with \u00a320.7bn Slack acquisition"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n Bobby Hellard<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n
2 Dec, 2020<\/span><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Salesforce has agreed to buy workplace messaging platform\u00a0Slack<\/a>\u00a0in a deal worth $27.7 billion (\u00a320.7 billion),\u00a0the largest acquisition in the cloud giant’s history.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Under the terms of the deal, Slack will now operate as a\u00a0Salesforce<\/a>\u00a0company, but it will still be led by CEO Stewart Butterfield. \u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\nThe acquisition was first\u00a0reported earlier this\u00a0week<\/a>\u00a0but an official announcement came late on Tuesday, ahead of Salesforce’s annual conference Dreamforce. It is one of the largest deals in recent years, falling just short of\u00a0IBM’s $34 billion takeover of Red Hat in 2019<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The two companies will form a unified platform for enterprise collaboration with Slack integrated into every Salesforce cloud. The communications service will also become the new interface for\u00a0Salesforce 360<\/a>\u00a0customers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, called Slack one of the most beloved platforms in enterprise software history and said the acquisition was a “match made in heaven”. In turn, Butterfield called it the “most strategic combination in the history of software”.<\/p>\n

Butterfield also pointed out that Salesforce “started the cloud revolution”, referencing the company’s early work selling software as a subscription service (SaaS<\/a>). It is now the standard practice and a billion-dollar industry with companies like Microsoft dominating with its online Microsoft 365 suite.<\/p>\n

Slack has endured a long rivalry with Microsoft<\/a>\u00a0and its competing Teams platform, which benefits from being bundled in with 365 subscriptions. There is a suggestion that joining Salesforce, a customer relationship management (CRM<\/a>) software company with a large enterprise portfolio and customer base, will help push Slack further into that market and potentially level the playing field.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world,” Benioff said in a statement. “I’m thrilled to welcome Slack to the Salesforce Ohana once the transaction closes.”<\/p>\n

Microsoft has also wadded into competition with Salesforce by recently making\u00a0CRM software a priority<\/a>. Benioff previously said that his company was the world’s fastest-growing enterprise software company while announcing plans to\u00a0create 12,000 new jobs over the next year<\/a>. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bobby Hellard<\/p>\n

2 Dec, 2020 <\/p>\n

Salesforce has agreed to buy workplace messaging platform\u00a0Slack\u00a0in a deal worth $27.7 billion (\u00a320.7 billion),\u00a0the largest acquisition in the cloud giant’s history.\u00a0
\nUnder the terms of the deal,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":403,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41618"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41622,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41618\/revisions\/41622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}