SLACK + SALESFORCE = ________?
End of the Year is M&A season. CFO’s don’t mind getting transactions finished for the current reporting period. And Salesforce has managed to do so. It just has acquired Slack for as little as $27.7 billion.
What’s the larger impact of this acquisition? Both companies have set out to transform how people work, and both have been successful in doing so. Before paying $ 27.7 for a business, both parties will usually sit together to draw a roadmap for the next years to come. Therefore it seems reasonable to believe their press release in that “the combination will create the operating system for the new way to work”.
But how? Slack has shifted “internal communication out of inboxes and into channels, teams can work more transparently with each other and get more done”. This year Slack has opened up inter-company communication through its channels, setting Slack up to become a kind of social network for work. Unlike Microsoft, Slack has focused on integrating the communication, the chat, not integrating the tools. Microsoft offers a vertically integrated solution of apps for one business. Slack on the other hand, by focusing on chat as the main form of communication, enhanced by a huge ecosystem of integrations, is independent from the actual app a business uses. The impact then is on enhancing inter-company communication. This is also the field that Salesforce has been playing in from the beginning.
The way we work has increasingly shifted from rigid organisation structures to more flexible structures. In many sectors, work gets done not through one business, but through a network of collaborators, whether they are freelancers, business partners or service providers. The Slack-Salesforce combination could have quite an impact on how this way of working is performed, and enabling organisations to become more agile in their structures.