Salesforce acquires Slack

© iStock/Spiria.

This week’s biggest news on planet tech: Salesforce is purchasing Slack for close to 28 billion dollars. The announcement follows a week of rumors and a steep bump in Slack’s value on the stock market in anticipation of the deal being made official. Both companies serve corporate clients, one with its CRM tools and the other with its startlingly successful messaging system. Salesforce is in a fierce competition with Microsoft to win over businesses that are in the market for cloud-based products and services. Microsoft runs arguably the most significant Slack competitor, Microsoft Teams, but Salesforce had not matched either Slack or Teams with an equivalent offering. Explaining the deal to investors during a telephone conference, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the decision was based on the hunch that the recent pandemic-based shift to remote work is in fact a revolution that’s here to stay. The deal still has to receive regulatory approval. Daniel Stewart Butterfield, the Canadian creator of Slack, is not new to big deals: before creating Slack, he developed Flickr, the photo hosting service he sold to Yahoo in 2005.

⇨ Ars Technica, Samuel Axon, “Salesforce strikes deal to acquire Slack for $27.7 billion.”