![]() ![]() If all goes smoothly, Salesforce hopes to take control of Slack sometime from May to July next year. She said the need for customer-relations agents and other Salesforce users to swarm around a topic and collaborate remotely has only grown with the coronavirus pandemic that has sent so many office workers home and got many hooked on new online tools. Leggett predicted Salesforce would benefit from owning Slack because it will add a popular collaboration tool to its own software suite, which is focused on managing customer relationships for businesses and government agencies. A few years later, he shifted to the instant messaging service whose name was an acronym for “searchable log of all conversation and knowledge". In his next act after leaving Flickr, Butterfield decided to focus on gaming with a start-up called Tiny Speck that launched in 2009. Flickr got lost in the shuffle at Yahoo amid years of turmoil before it was finally sold again in 2018 to SmugMug. Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield will be hoping this sale works out better than when another company he started, photo sharing service Flickr, was sold to Yahoo 15 years ago. ![]() ![]() "Microsoft Teams is eating Slack’s lunch." "This is a stellar exit strategy for Slack," said Kate Leggett, an analyst at Forrester Research. Salesforce has been building on its success in recent years to diversify into other fields, largely through a series of acquisitions that included its previous largest deal, a $15.7 billion purchase of data analytics specialist Tableau Software last year. It’s a central nervous system for so many companies." "We see in Slack a once-in-a-generation company and platform. "It's a match made in heaven," Benioff said during an ebullient conference call. Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield has previous form in starting and then selling successful tech companies, with Flickr.īenioff left no doubt he considered the deal to be a major coup, after losing out to Microsoft in 2016 when the two companies were both vying to buy the professional networking service LinkedIn. "It's just clear Microsoft is moving further and further away from Salesforce when it comes to the cloud wars." "For Benioff, this is all about Microsoft," Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said of Tuesday's deal. Microsoft also has been posing a threat to Salesforce's main products, a line-up of tools that help companies manage their customer relationships. Slack in July filed a complaint in the European Union accusing Microsoft of illegally bundling Teams into Office 365 in a way that blocks its removal by customers who may prefer Slack. Microsoft for one has developed its own thriving online suite of services, known as Office 365, which includes a Teams chatting service that includes many of the same features as Slack's six-year-old application. Salesforce's flamboyant founder and chief executive officer, Marc Benioff, hailed the "cloud computing" concept as the wave of the future to much derision initially.īut software as a service has become an industry standard that has turned into a gold mine for long-time software makers. Marc Benioff, billionaire and co-founder and chief executive officer of, believes the acquisition is a major coup in its battle with Microsoft. The San Francisco company was one of the first to begin selling software as a subscription service that could be used on any internet-connected device instead of the more cumbersome process of installing the programs on individual computers. ![]() The acquisition announced on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT) is by far the largest in the 21-year history of Salesforce. Business software pioneer is buying work-chatting service Slack for $US27.7 billion ($37.6 billion) in a deal aimed at giving the two companies a better shot at competing against long-time industry powerhouse Microsoft. ![]()
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