"What this is all about is the value of the social enterprise," Benioff said on a call with analysts after the announcement. The company started down this road as long ago as 2009, with the introduction of the Chatter social networking product, but Benioff says that Slack provides the final missing piece - a real-time chat app that people use every minute of every hour of their working day, particularly in the pandemic. Rather than a competitive reaction to Microsoft, the execs involved are positioning the deal as something that will prove transformational not only for Salesforce, but the entire industry.īutterfield has even gone so far as to suggest that this deal will end up in the annals of tech history, right alongside the launch of Microsoft Windows 95 and the invention of the cloud itself, thanks to how much easier it makes remote and distributed working.įor his part, Benioff is selling this deal as the culmination of his vision for a "social enterprise," where collaboration is baked right into the Salesforce platform such that employees can work together on any file or project without unnecessary friction. Marc Benioff and Stewart Butterfield have a big vision More than that, however, it proves just how hard it is not to compete with Microsoft, or with fellow mega-cloud providers Amazon Web Services or Google - especially as the market continues to consolidate. No matter what they say, however, there's no denying that the so-called SlackForce deal will see Salesforce take on Microsoft in a new way. "It's not based on any empirical evidence - it's just people think Microsoft is a bigger company, and they have a huge channel, and so they'll inevitably win, despite the fact that we win," Butterfield told the Information's Kevin McLaughlin. In an interview with the New York Times, Benioff pretended not to have ever heard of Microsoft Butterfield told The Information that for all the conventional wisdom that the massive success of Microsoft Teams is crushing Slack, his company is thriving. Still, it's not hard to imagine that the final figure had a certain appeal to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his well-documented flair for the dramatic.īenioff and Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield have separately downplayed Microsoft's influence on the deal. Intentional? Probably not - deals of this magnitude have so many hands on the wheel that it would be hard to steer it so precisely just to make a point. Now, when they make the lists of the biggest tech acquisitions of the last ten years, Salesforce/Slack will sit just a little bit higher than the deal that got away. But it wasn't so very long ago that Salesforce famously lost out on its chance to buy LinkedIn, which ultimately sold itself to Microsoft for $27.2 billion. If you squint, it's kind of funny that Salesforce is paying $27.7 billion for Slack, the workplace messaging chat app, in its largest acquisition ever. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.Still, the so-called SlackForce deal could trigger a wave of M&A as other competitors, like Google Cloud and maybe Amazon Web Services, focus on the collaboration market. But like it or not, there's no way for Salesforce to chase that ambition without competing with Microsoft, which isn't easy.By tying data from Salesforce's business software with Slack chats, it helps achieve CEO Marc Benioff's decade-long ambition for the "social enterprise," where the gap between data and decision-making vanishes.Salesforce and Slack say that their $27.7 billion deal isn't about Microsoft, it's about a new way to work.Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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