Software company Salesforce, a forerunner in cloud computing, has just acquired collaborative messaging company Slack for $27 billion. This is Salesforce's biggest acquisition since it was founded in 1999, and should enable it to compete with Microsoft and its Teams tool.
Slack caught up by Teams
Aimed at the professional market, Slack collaborative messaging began to make waves in the mid-2010s. At the time, it was positioned as an alternative to the e-mails that flood professional messaging systems.
Slack managed to raise considerable funds, over $500 million between 2014 and 2016, and the start-up came close to an $8 billion proposal by Microsoft, which Bill Gates and Satya Nadella opposed at the last moment. The number of daily users of Slack messaging has jumped 2,600% in 4 years, to 8 million in 2018 and 12 million in 2019.
But at the same time, Microsoft launched its Teams software, a collaborative platform also aimed at the professional market and integrated into the Office 365 office suite. For the very many companies that already had this suite, all they had to do was add functionality, enabling rapid deployment of this new tool.
The Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown led to widespread teleworking, which turned out to be a real opportunity for these software products. Slack, however, took less advantage of this than Microsoft, which took the opportunity to offer Teams for free during part of the spring lockdown. While Slack has continued to grow in a rather linear fashion, Teams has surged ahead, also seducing thanks to its more extensive features, such as videoconferencing.
Salesforce's takeover: the biggest deal in the industry
When it released its results for the previous quarter, Salesforce announced that it had acquired collaborative messaging company Slack for $27.7 billion. This makes the cloud-based software company the largest deal in the sector, just ahead of Microsoft's $26.2 billion takeover of LinkedIn in 2016.
The takeover of Slack still needs to be approved by the authorities, but in any case, Salesforce has decided to leave its co-founder and current CEO, Stewart Butterfield, at the helm of Slack. The aim of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is tointegrate Slack with his own cloud offerings, enabling users to bring together their exchanges, data and information on a single tool.
For Salesforce, the acquisition of Slack is a way of increasing its leverage against Microsoft, whose Teams tool had 115 million users at the end of October, representing 53% growth in 6 months.