Slack, a patented business communication platform is all set to be acquired by Salesforce for US$ 27.7 Billion, in a cash and stock deal.
Salesforce.com, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It offers customer relationship management service and also sells an interrelated suite of enterprise applications focused on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development. Salesforce, along with announcing its third-quarter earnings said on 1st December 2020 that it had entered into a final agreement with Slack, a week after stories came forward of the potential deal. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the possible deal and since then, Slack’s value has increased to over US$ 25 Billion on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
Succeeding the acquisition, Slack will become the new interface for Salesforce Customer 360, a tool that enables companies to link Salesforce apps in order to create a single view of a given client. Salesforce is offering Slack shareholders US$ 26.79 in cash and 0.0776 Salesforce shares for each share of Slack they own, equaling US$ 45.54 per Slack share.
Marc Benioff, chair and CEO of Salesforce said that CEO Stewart Butterfield and his team have built one of the greatest platforms in enterprise software history, with a far-fetched ecosystem around it. He further added that this acquisition is a match made in heaven and together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and alter the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world.
About Slack
Slack is a messaging platform developed by American software company Slack Technologies. Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, Slack Technologies was founded by Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson. The company is now headquartered in San Francisco.
Slack offers many IRC (Internet relay chat)-style features, including chat rooms (channels) organized by topic, private groups, and direct messaging. Content, such as files, conversations, and people, everything is easily searchable within Slack. Users can even react to messages using different kinds of emojis.
The messaging app’s free plan permits only the 10,000 most recent messages to be viewed and searched. It also has a feature called Slack teams, enabling communities, groups, or teams to join a “workspace” through a specific URL or invite sent by a team admin or owner. Even though Slack was built for professional and organizational communication, it has been adopted as a community platform, replacing messaging panels or social media groups. Another benefit offered by Slack is that it integrates with many third-party services, including Google Drive, Trello, Dropbox, Box, Heroku, IBM Bluemix, Crashlytics, GitHub, Runscope, Zendesk and Zapier. Slack provides an API for users to create applications and automate processes, such as sending automatic notifications based on human input or on stated conditions and automatically creating internal support tickets.
Slack went public on the NYSE in June 2019 via direct listing, bypassing the process of its long-due initial public offering (IPO). Prior to the rumors of the acquisition by Salesforce came up last week, Slack’s stock was close to US$ 26, which was its initial listing price last year.
The company has also reported momentous customer growth amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, as enterprises around the world were forced to shift operations entirely online and demand for communication software surged. According to its Q1 financial report released in June, a record 12,000 net new paid customers joined Slack in the quarter, bringing the total to 122,000 paid customers, a growth of 28 percent year over year.
CEO Stewart Butterfield said that because software plays a very critical role in the performance of every organization, Slack shares a vision of reduced complexity, amplified power and flexibility, and ultimately a greater degree of alignment and organizational agility. He was quoted to say, “Personally, I believe this is the most strategic combination in the history of software, and I can’t wait to get going.”
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