Salesforce is using its stock to pay for roughly half of the Slack purchase, with the rest being covered with some cash, with some of the money being borrowed during a time of extraordinarily low interest rates. It's certainly Salesforce's largest, and probably most important for a variety of reasons. The company is also headquartered in San Francisco, but it has offices in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal.
"Combining Slack with Salesforce Customer 360 will be transformative for customers and the industry", Salesforce announced.
Slack also integrates with thousands of apps, allowing clients to pick and choose services to suit their collaboration and productivity needs.
The alliance unites the two internet companies against Microsoft, the world's biggest software company. He didn't talk about the number of daily users or how much the company would add to the bottom line.
According to Benioff, Salesforce's vision was to be a social enterprise.
Slack's meteoric rise is one which few could ignore.
It would be easy, especially when talking about a deal worth nearly $28 billion, to overlook something like the way the people who use a piece of software feel about it, but it's important.
"(Salesforce) shares will likely be range-bound in the short term given the large transaction, but we are believers in the benefits of this deal to CRM and see shares recovering", Barclays analyst Raimo Lenschow said.
Slack has become a major part of our work lives for many of us in 2020.
Salesforce announced that it was acquiring "the most innovative enterprise communications platform" in order to "create the operating system for the new way to work, uniquely enabling companies to grow and succeed in the all-digital world". It isn't just about the software, but about how it helps teams stay engaged and connected. Benioff plans to nudge his other CEO friends to join Slack, and intends to leverage Salesforce's massive sales team to sell Slack. But the company spun off one of its tools to become the photo-sharing app Flickr.
"We don't yet know how well CRM can truly monetize this asset in the future, especially given the formidable presence of Microsoft Teams", Moskowitz said.
The combined companies are said to provide 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", Benioff added.
"Slack extends Salesforce capabilities beyond their leading customer relationship management platform into modern collaboration capabilities that will appeal to sellers, marketers, developers and other departments across many organizations", Grosse said. Since then, Slack has struggled to compete with Teams, which has been aggressively promoted by the software giant. In the end, it's hard to put a price on that. This new fair value estimate is equivalent to $26.79 per share in cash plus the value we assign to the fraction of Salesforce shares received, based on our $253 fair value estimate for Salesforce.
