IBM acquired Redhat for $34 Billion, Softbank bought ARM for $31.4 Billion, Microsoft bought LinkedIn for 26.2 billion and Facebook took over WhatsApp for 22 Billion. You all know the stories. Marking one of the biggest acquisition of the modern-day, Slack was bought by Salesforce for a whopping amount of 27.7 Billon. Many in the industry saw this coming as there were rumours of the deal since last week.
Putting forward his ideas about the deal, the current CEO and the co-founder of Salesforce Marc Benioff told the media that Salesforce together with Slack could change the future of enterprise software. He showed his interest in creating a digital world with “work from anywhere concept.”
The CEO of Slack, Stewart Butterfield talked about the importance of enterprise software in his statement. According to him, this is the most strategic combination in the history of software and he shared his excitement on working together with the Salesforce.
Starting off as a gaming company, Slack transformed itself into trending enterprise software by 2010. Initially, Slack was pitched to companies as software which could be used instead of emails. Since then, the company led by Stewart Butterfield has come a long way building a stature for themselves daring to go head to head with one of the biggest tech giants of them all, Microsoft as well. There were 12 million-plus active users and a market value of almost $25 billion for Slack when the numbers came out last October. Before Salesforce, companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon laid efforts to take over Slack. But the attempts went in vain.
The COVID-19 pandemic made sure the people do not step out of their homes to the offices. This was an opportunity for Slack and, it has reaped out from it garnering a revenue of $216 million from March to July.
Slack faced stiff competition from Microsoft Teams which recorded a daily user count of 115 million in October. That is 50% of growth from April.
Purchasing Slack gives Salesforce a tool to fight one of its biggest rivals, Microsoft, which has been pushing Teams heavily during the pandemic.
Salesforce which is known for cloud-based software, marketing and sales managing software has acquired more than 60 companies till now. The interesting part is that 27 of them are during the last half a decade. Acquiring Slack for 27.7 Billion USD is their highest acquisition ever during their stay in the market. Salesforce has been in news for trying to acquire LinkedIn and Twitter before.
There is a war between Microsoft and Salesforce for market supremacy and “Slack” will be Salesforce’s biggest weapon to combat Microsoft’s “Teams” which is being pushed by Microsoft rigorously as the pandemic still goes on.
In the year 2019, Salesforce made acquisitions like Tableau, ClickSoftware, Bonobo AI, Griddable and etc. It seems like Salesforce is in a takeover spree.
