Business software maker Salesforce has completed its acquisition of Slack. Salesforce wants to build Slack into a workplace app for business collaborations.
In December last year, it was announced that Salesforce paid about $ 27.7 billion for the collaboration app Slack. The US competition authorities approved the deal this week, which means that the acquisition is now complete.
Immediately, Salesforce also makes it clear what it intends to do with the app that is especially popular among business users. For example, companies now mainly use Slack as an internal tool to make it easier for colleagues to communicate with each other, for example, in separate channels built around teams, topics or concrete projects.
Salesforce now wants to expand that functionality further. For example, Slack channels should eventually grow into hubs that can replace all emails, phone calls and video conferencing. And not only internal conversations, but also communication that takes place, for example, between a sales team that closes a deal with a purchasing team at another company.
Slack thus breaks out of the internal straitjacket and must therefore facilitate collaboration across company boundaries. Put those puzzle pieces together and end up with something like Teams: Microsoft partly set up to counter the rapidly becoming popular Slack.
In other words, Slack seems to become a stronger challenger to the Teams app, which clearly gained popularity during the pandemic. However, teams will also become an integral part of Windows 11, illustrating that Microsoft pushes the accelerator around cloud collaboration.
