Posted by San Francisco: Salesforce will acquire Slack in a deal worth $27.7 billion. Salesforce – a CRM software major on Tuesday said that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Slack Technologies – an enterprise communication platform.
Under the signed pact, Salesforce will pay Slack shareholders $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of Salesforce common stock for each Slack share. The enterprise value of this deal is around $27.7 billion based on the closing price of Salesforce’s common stock on November 30, 2020.
The move behind this acquisition is to combine Slack with Salesforce Customer 360 and offer a transformative customer experience, according to Salesforce.
From a technology perspective, Slack will be deeply integrated into every Salesforce Cloud and will become a new interface for Salesforce Customer 360. It aims to transform how people communicate, collaborate and take action on customer information across Salesforce.
Also, it aims to transform information from other business apps and systems to be more intelligent and productive for the customers, helping them make faster decisions and create connected customer experiences.
Since many of work collaboration and communication platforms like Zendesk, Avaya and others have integrations with Slack platform. And that provides a huge opportunity for Salesforce to further expand its CRM platform reach deeper into millions and millions of users and customers globally.
Stewart Butterfield and Carl Henderson co-founded Slack Technologies in 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Before Slack started its journey as a software company, Butterfield was already using as a communication tool in his company Tiny Speck.
“Stewart and his team have built one of the most beloved platforms in enterprise software history, with an incredible ecosystem around it,” said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce.
Calling this deal as a ‘match made in heaven’ Benioff stated, “The combination of Sales and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world.”
Stewart Butterfield, Slack CEO and Co-Founder credited Salesforce for starting the cloud revolution two decades ago and said that, “We are still tapping into all the possibilities it offers to transform the way we work. The opportunity we see together is massive.”
“We share a vision of reduced complexity, increased power and flexibility, and ultimately a greater degree of alignment and organisational agility,” Butterfield pointed out.
“I believe this is the most strategic combination in the history of software, and I can’t wait to get going,” Butterfield opined.
Together, Salesforce and Slack will give companies a single source of truth for their business and a unified platform for connecting employees, customers and partners with each other and the apps they use every day, all within their existing workflows.
The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2022, subject to approvals of Slack stockholders, regulators and other customary closing conditions.
However, post the transaction closure, Slack will become an operating unit of Salesforce and Butterfield will continue to lead it.