salesforce is acquiring slack in a 27.7 billion dollar deal but what does this
mean for the future of collaboration stick around hey everyone welcome back to today
in tech i'm julia beauchamp and i'm here with computer world senior writer matthew finnegan
it seems especially important and pertinent that salesforce is acquiring slack at a time
where remote work and reliance on collaboration tools is extraordinarily high so matthew could
you walk us through salesforce's decision and slacks decision to take part in this acquisition
and why it's especially important that it's happening right now
yeah so it's a huge acquisition that was announced this week 27.7 billion
dollars so it's one of the the largest uh i think it's the second largest software company
acquisition ever and the biggest acquisition for salesforce which has been a very inquisitive firm
in recent years so um this is still this happening during a pandemic when there's been a lot of
interest in remote work tools and slack has in recent years been at the forefront in terms of
digital platforms to connect workers whether they're in the same office or working remotely
so interestingly you know slack has arguably or has has um hasn't seen the level of growth of
adoption as some of the other collaboration and communication and cloud productivity tools in
uh in the months since march if you compare it with for example zoom which has seen huge growth
in terms of adoption in terms of revenues and share price slack has um well grown
it hasn't grown to the same degree as even other providers like its main rival microsoft
with its team's platform so salesforce has been interested in this area for some time it's
had its chatter enterprise social network um application for example and it's been one of the
companies which have been looking to acquire slack for some time so slack on the other hand has faced
really strong competition from microsoft teams since it launched in 2017 and its growth hasn't
hasn't really been what people were hoping for during the pandemic um which is the time when
it's really obviously shown the need for these sort of tools to connect workers to connect
data across organizations no matter where people are working and this is a salesforce obviously
sees that this is a trend that will be carrying on long term even after people start to go back
to the office the remote working in in some form is here to stay so this deal has been described as
sort of mutually beneficial between the heads of salesforce and slack rather this this this
deal has been described as mutually beneficial by those by the heads of salesforce and slack both
of them so i'm wondering how this deal makes both salesforce and slack more appealing to enterprise
customers that perhaps aren't using either or both of those tools yet what do you think
yeah so it's it's generally been perceived as a positive deal for both companies
for slack this means that it yeah gets a a huge exit deal um and as well as
the ability to grow its its customer base in the face of um yeah strong competition from
microsoft teams under the ownership of another um really large software company in salesforce
uh so from salesforce's perspective this means uh they can tap into what's been a
kind of a phenomenon within the team collaboration market a hugely popular application
um that the aim has been to to replace email and it's grown to 12 million daily active users since
these last statistics were announced at the end of last year and the the acquisition means
that salesforce can use slack to kind of move into targeting the employee experience
area obviously salesforce's main focus has been around crm so catering to sales and marketing and
customer service stuff but this the slack deal really helps it focus on improving its employee
employee engagement um portfolio it's already also acquired a company called quip um three or four
years ago for around seven uh 750 million dollars which is a kind of a sort of collaborative um
productivity tool so it's an area of focus for for salesforce for some time and uh the idea is that
it will be integrated into the or the slack will be used as an interface for for the salesforce
customer 360 portfolio over time so yeah there's been some critics that said that the deal is
overpriced and that maybe it doesn't go far enough in terms of competing with with microsoft as a
um productivity and collaboration suite but um generally there's a lot of potential uh salesforce
is able to tap into a new stream of revenue growth and through stack even though it hasn't
slack hasn't grown maybe to the degree of zoom during the the pandemic it's also a growing
business and salesforce sees plenty of opportunity um to roll out slack to
to to access larger slack deployments and using or to distribute slack more widely
using its existing base of of enterprise customers so yeah both companies see
there's significant positives on this i think too whenever an acquisition happens especially
when you know a behemoth company like salesforce is acquiring slack which is also you know huge
but by salesforce standards certainly not quite as large i think the immediate reaction can be
you know how if at all is that smaller company slack in this case going to change and do you
perceive or have you heard or have there's have there been any sort of caveats to the deal that
would make it seem as though slack is going to change in any sort of big way whether
it's on the user experience side or um i guess perhaps the way that it is utilized
yeah so to to a degree it's kind of wait and see the the indications from salesforce certainly are
the uh they they plans for slack to continue as an independent application with its own branding
and so forth although it will be integrated of course into the customer 360 suite so
it's fair to say that we're going to see strong first party integrations
between slack and cell sources tools which remains to be seen exactly how that will pan out but for
example there's potential around quip being more tightly being tightly integrated into slack for
example there have been integrations between slack and various sales tools for some time but
of course there's going to be that that will be built on um a lot over the next while of course
so there are question marks about in the long term to what degree will slack become embedded
into salesforce to what degree will it remain a standalone application um for example quip
its productivity app has begun to be integrated more tightly into some salesforce's app so um
yeah we'll have to see over time but definitely the the indications are that salesforce doesn't
won't want to uh do anything too drastic with slack in the short term and you know slack stack's
a popular platform it's accessible and people like the interface and that's one of the real
strong points of slack compared to microsoft teams really is the interface is is that it has a slack
has a lot of users who are who are passionate about the applications who who like using it so
it would it would seem unlikely that salesforce would want to
to mess around with that too much straight away but yeah there will be more integration for sure
absolutely so we've discussed a little bit about how this slack and sales force
partnership by acquisition of course can can perhaps make salesforce and slack sort of level
up and compete more you know head head-to-head with microsoft but i'm wondering what this sort
of means for the future of collaboration tools in general in collaboration apps
when you know like i've just said a behemoth company like salesforce
acquires slack which is still large in its own right i mean um it was recently um
publicly traded so it's not like it's any sort of you know small indie company that being said i'm
wondering what it means for any sort of smaller startups um and how any sort of smaller startups
may be able to enter the collaboration space and compete with now microsoft and salesforce
so so what this acquisition shows is kind of how difficult it can be for innovative startups
in the collaboration and productivity space when it in terms of their long-term prospects
competing with the large tech companies like microsoft of course so with slack and after it's
huge initial growth as one of the fastest growing enterprise business applications in history
it's faced really severe competition from microsoft which was able to create its own tool
build out really quickly and bundle it with its office 365 suite of applications
so this does raise questions for for some of the other um up and coming cloud productivity and
cloud collaboration communication apps such as air table and coda and notion which are really gaining
traction as well but it does a big question of of how far can these companies go without requiring
the support of of a lives or organization like salesforce or microsoft for example
great well thank you so much matthew i really appreciate your insight and as much as some of
this deal and the implications of this deal are going to be a little bit of a wait and
see situation it's still interesting to see and predict what could become of slack sales force
and the collaboration space in general so i really appreciate it matthew thank you so much
thank you very much and thank you so much everyone for watching this episode of today
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if you have any thoughts comments questions about the slack and salesforce deal what do you think
it means for the future of collaboration apps is your enterprise now going to be more likely to use
either salesforce or slack or both rather than microsoft let us know in the comments i'm
really interested to hear your thoughts thanks again for watching and i'll see you next time