Salesforce to buy slack, to compete with Microsoft

The tech magnet Salesforce, who has a strong competition with Sales Force is in talks to buy Slack, the work messaging app. Slack Technologies shares jumped 24% to $36.58, with this the company a market capitalization of $21 billion, at the same time, Salesforce fell 2.7% after the report on the two companies had held deal talks. As reported, Slack's difficulties in capitalizing on the shift to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Marc Benioff, CEO,Salesforce.com is putting all his efforts to buy Slack Technologies which is valued at $17 billion and with this it would compete with Microsoft Team and SAP in multiple areas. Salesforce sees the potential acquisition as a logical extension of its enterprise offerings, but it’s still unclear how much the deal would be worth.

As reported by Forbes, the mobile application analytics platform Sensor Tower, its app has been installed about 12.6 million times so far this year, up approximately 50% from the same period in 2019. And, Slack has always been more than a mere chat service. It enables companies to embed workflows, and this would fit well in the Salesforce family of products of sales, service, marketing, and more.

Reuters reports that Salesforce is looking to pay cash for Slack rather than trade its stock. Salesforce is a dominant player in the customer relationship management (CRM) market and has partnered with Slack for years. It's also a competitor to Microsoft's Dynamics 365 CRM.

Both Salesforce apps enable business users to share customer data with colleagues, a task that is better suited to chat than video. So Salesforce could benefit from having control of its own enterprise messaging platform and from the hundreds of enterprise apps that integrate with Slack's chat functionality.

With Salesforce’s distribution and selling capabilities, Slack would instantly be propelled into C-level executive discussions across industries. An acquisition by Salesforce would give Slack greater opportunity to compete against Microsoft Teams for wall-to-wall enterprise deployments. It would be Salesforce’s largest acquisition, exceeding last year’s $14.8 billion deal to buy data visualization software company Tableau.