Salesforce adquirió el proveedor de software de colaboración Slack en un acuerdo por valor de 27.700 millones de dólares.
The acquisition, the details of which were revealed last week, will see Slack's corporate chat app integrated with Salesforce cloud tools, serving as a new interface to its Customer 360 product portfolio.
"Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform how everyone works in the all-digital workplace and anywhere," said Salesforce President and CEO Marc Benioff. , in a press release. The acquisition was announced after the financial markets closed in the United States on Tuesday afternoon.
"The opportunity we see together is huge," said Stewart Butterfield, Slack's CEO and co-founder. “As software plays an increasingly critical role in the performance of every organization, we share a vision of reduced complexity, increased power and flexibility. … Personally, I think this is the most strategic combination in the history of software, and I can't wait to go.
For Slack, the deal will mean access to bigger business customers and more influence while competing with main rival Microsoft.
"On the plus side, Slack is getting an investor who can integrate the service with what it needs to compete with Microsoft and Google," said Patrick Moorhead, a senior analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.
To truly compete with vendors of collaboration software packages like Microsoft and Google, Moorhead said, Salesforce will need to further strengthen its proposition around video and personal productivity.
“While some companies want a cutting-edge approach and will prepare it via APIs, others want integrated designs like the current offering from Microsoft (Teams/Office 365) and Google (Workspaces),” Moorhead said. "Salesforce may need to buy a company like Zoom and build a top-tier productivity suite for the Slack investment to pay off."
Since its launch in 2014, Slack has revolutionized the collaboration software industry with its popular channel-based approach to communication, which has proven to be a hit with users looking for an alternative to email. Additionally, its wide range of third-party integrations has helped the app become an integral part of the workflows of many corporate teams, a pain point for some collaboration tools in the past.
In September 2019, Slack said it had 12 million daily active users, with 130.000 paying customers, according to its latest financial statement.
In recent years, Slack has focused on large enterprise deployments, with the launch of its Enterprise Grid product in 2017 paving the way for the introduction of security and compliance features. Sixty-five of the Fortune 100 companies are Slack users; Starbucks and Target are among Slack's Fortune 500 customers.
At the same time, Slack has faced significant headwinds in recent years. Most notable has been growing competition from Microsoft, which launched its Teams platform three years ago after apparently considering its own takeover offer for Slack in 2016.
Teams, available at no additional cost to Office 365 subscribers, has 115 million daily active users, and adoption has skyrocketed during the pandemic and the workforce lockdown that followed. Slack's growth this year has been seen as mediocre by comparison, as other players in the collaboration software market, notably Zoom, have seen revenue soar as employees shift to working from home.
Additionally, Slack, which completed its direct listing last year, remains unprofitable, although losses have decreased significantly year-over-year, based on fiscal 2021 second-quarter results. it also weakened, falling almost half its IPO level, before rising sharply due to an acquisition last week.
The Slack acquisition adds to a long list of major Salesforce acquisitions. These include the Tableau data visualization tool (€15,3 billion) and the MuleSoft integration platform (€6,5 billion), as well as the €750 million purchase of the Quip collaborative productivity app in 2016.
Previous acquisitions bear some similarity to the Slack acquisition, said Jason Wong, vice president of analyst for Gartner's application design and development team. “In major acquisitions like MuleSoft, Tableau, and now Slack, their communities and ecosystems were important factors in Salesforce's strategy,” he said.
“Slack’s platform already integrates with over 2400 apps and its ability to allow partners, professional developers, and even citizen developers to use low-code and no-code approaches to building extensions and apps on its platform is a good fit by the book. of Salesforce strategies. Salesforce has sold employee apps over the years, including its corporate social network Chatter and its Community Cloud social portal, as well as its Work.com platform, which has helped companies respond to their people through the pandemic. But the acquisition of Slack provides immediate access to a widely used collaboration platform with millions of avid users while enhancing its internal collaboration capabilities.
"At Slack, they now have the ability to deliver broader, horizontal employee collaboration (WSC) capabilities and link customer experience (CX) with employee experience (EX)," said Wong.
The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of fiscal 2022.
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