Salesforce is buying workplace messaging app Slack for $27.7 billion, marking the largest acquisition in the San Francisco-based cloud-based company’s history.
Under the terms of the agreement, Slack (WORK) shareholders will receive $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of Salesforce stock per Slack share. Salesforce (CRM) announced the deal Tuesday in conjunction with its earnings release for its third quarter of fiscal 2021.
The move will allow Salesforce (CRM), which sells cloud-based customer relationship management software and other enterprise applications, to bolster its business offerings.
An acquisition from an enterprise software and services giant like Salesforce could help accelerate Slack’s user growth even more.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in a call with analysts Tuesday called Slack a “supercharger” for Salesforce. He said he plans to expand Slack in the enterprise space especially by combining the companies’ capabilities and creating “this amazing hub of productivity of collaboration, integration and applications that now leverage all this amazing data.” He added that currently, 90% of Slack’s enterprise customers are also Salesforce customers.
“Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world,” Benioff said in a statement.
The acquisition will position Salesforce and Microsoft (MSFT), with its Teams chat platform, as closer competitors in the remote collaboration space.
Because Teams comes bundled with Microsoft’s Office products often used in the workplace, it has seen significant growth as more people work remotely. CEO Satya Nadella said Teams’ grew to 75 million daily active users by the end of April, up from 44 million from mid-March.Â
In October 2019, the last time it reported this specific metric, Slack said it had 12 million active daily users.
