Oversize #14: With Slack, Salesforce gets a shot at nailing collaboration game

Abhishek Baxi

07 December 2020

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“May the (Sales)force be with you!”

Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and CEO of Slack, definitely likes the sound of that.

Slack, since launching in 2013, has done well to establish a new paradigm in workspace collaboration and become the fastest-growing enterprise software tool of all time. But the company has been struggling in the face of the onslaught mounted by Microsoft Teams—as I wrote in the last edition of Oversize—and also failed to cash in on the opportunity that the remote working necessitated by the pandemic has offered.

A deep-pocketed owner like Salesforce, with well-established sales and distribution channels inside enterprises, will help Slack overcome those challenges. But what’s in it for Salesforce? After all, at $27.7 billion, it is its biggest acquisition yet.

SaaS

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