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Salesforce said the deal creates “the operating system for the new way of working.”
Salesforce.com Inc () has reached a $ 27.7 billion agreement to acquire () in a cash transaction more shares.
Investors will receive $ 26.79 in cash and 0.0776 Salesforce shares for every Slack share they own. The acquisition remains conditional on Slack shareholder approval, although shareholders representing 55% of the company have already endorsed the deal.
See Salesforce grab a ‘sticky’ team-based communications platform that, like Zoom, has come true amid the ‘new normal’ of pervasive remote work.
According to Salesforce, the deal will be “transformative for customers and the industry.”
Salesforce said the deal creates “the operating system for the new way of working, allowing companies to grow and succeed in a fully digital world.”
“This is a match made in heaven,” Marc Benioff, Salesforce chief executive officer, said in a statement.
“Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of business software and transform the way everyone works in a fully digital world that works from anywhere.”
Stewart Butterfield, CEO and co-founder of Slack, added: “The opportunity we see together is enormous. As software plays an increasingly critical role in the performance of every organization, we share a vision of reduced complexity, greater power and flexibility, and ultimately a greater degree of organizational alignment and agility.
“Personally, I think this is the most strategic combination in the history of software and I can’t wait to get started.”
For the uninitiated, Slack is essentially a digital workspace within which organizations, teams, and other combinations of coworkers can share documents and communicate (via instant messaging, voice and video calls).
As a cloud-based solution that had significant market penetration prior to COVID-19, the platform saw mass adoption during the pandemic.
Yesterday’s third-quarter results, for example, showed a 35% increase in paying customers.
At the same time, and probably significant in the context of the Salesforce business, the Slack Connect product, a plug-in that enables independent organizations to communicate securely within Slack, increased the total number of paid customers and ‘connected terminals’ increased by 240% year-on-year.
Salesforce has already detailed that Slack will be “deeply integrated into each Salesforce cloud” and that the Slack platform will become the new interface of ‘Salesforce Customer 360’.
He expects Slack to “transform the way people communicate, collaborate and take action on customer information in Salesforce.”
