Salesforce has successfully closed its $27.7 billion acquisition of Slack Technologies Inc.. This takeover is driven by the business software maker’s belief that Slack will only continue to grow in terms of its user base, thanks to increasing collaborations with companies.
A New Partnership
The deal has gotten its due approval from antitrust regulators in the United States, and the takeover could lead Slack to become stronger and compete with Microsoft Corp.’s Teams application, which is the current market leader, in a new light.
The two parties, and their respective heads, namely, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and Salesforce President Bret Taylor, involved in the merger expect that this move will help them better serve their “joint customers,” especially across business deals. The deal was originally announced back in December last year and involves the incorporation of Slack into the Customer 360 service by Salesforce. The merger is being designed so as to allow companies the world over to come up with an easier way for customers and employees alike, to get things done.
Getting Things Done
Following the deal, it is expected that Slack channels will be able to replace all emails, video conferences, and even phone calls that the members between two teams from two separate companies engage in, during the process of, say, sales or trade between the two.
Moreover, sharing documents from third-party platforms like Google Drive is also a breeze with the service, since it has forged partnerships with a number of the most popular apps on the market. Moreover, these same documents can be signed virtually in a matter of minutes, through additional services like those available on DocuSign Inc. An example of the same can be found from the recent deal between Slack and Salesforce itself, for which, Taylor says, the formalities were performed through Slack channels.
The Salesforce Head also says that even while joking that the channel cross-linking the two companies had become the channel with the “highest billable hours” (thanks to the long line of lawyers and investment banks that were a member of the same), the process turned out to be a “really transformative experience.”
One interesting fact that has arisen is that while most people feel that Microsoft Teams is the No. 1 competitor that’s standing in Slack’s way, Butterfield holds that they will continue to integrate their service into Microsoft’s platform, in a bid to reduce the hassles that customers and employees have to face.
