San Francisco-based Salesforce is the world’s largest provider of customer relationship management (CRM) services. The company is in talks to buy Slack in a deal. Analysts claim that the deal is big enough to reshape the future of online business communications. Last year the company paid a sum of $15 billion to buy Seattle’s Tableau Software. But the deal to buy Slack even crosses the $15 billion mark.
Salesforce sells enterprise application software focused on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development. On the other hand, Slack offers an eponymous business communication platform with multiple IRC-style features, including persistent chat rooms (channels) organized by topic, private groups, and direct messaging.
According to sources, Slack had 2,431 employees worldwide at the end of July. Salesforce, on the other hand, has a total of over 49,000 employees. Slacks’ market value is estimated to be more than $20 billion, while Salesforce’s worth is a whopping sum of $230 billion.
Slack’s biggest competitor is Microsoft, whose own business communication software, Teams, has become one of the industry’s biggest names. Teams have around 115 million daily active users. On the other hand, Slack has more than 12 million daily active users and over 119,000 paid customers and is, without a doubt, one of the largest players in the sector.
Salesforce will be hosting its annual ‘Dreamforce’ conference next week, which will be virtual due to the on-going pandemic. But till now, neither Slack nor Salesforce has given any official statement regarding the deal. Many predict that the acquisition will be announced during the Dreamforce event. If not, we have to wait until next year to hear about the acquisition details finally.
