#Salesforce slack acquisition full
#Salesforce slack acquisition software

The connection to the broader Salesforce suite is a benefit for Slack, as it’s where employees are already working. “You're not provisioning people to a bunch of different systems just so they can access one chart or one ticket,” Rayl said. For example, you can file a quick Salesforce expense report without leaving Slack. The rest of Salesforce’s products, such as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, are still external to Slack but integrated through “thin work,” as Rayl called it. Quip moved into Slack’s domain after the deal closed. “Between Stewart and Brett, it was one of the things that they were both most excited about in this acquisition.” “Both products independently had this vision of teams being able to work with both a canvas-like product and a messaging product together, but each product independently focused in different areas,” Botwick said. But as we all know, those talks ended with Salesforce acquiring Slack instead of Slack acquiring Quip. Incorporating collaborative documents within Slack had been a part of Slack’s original pitch deck when it was first getting up and running, Botwick said. Fast forward a few years and, according to Botwick, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield approached Salesforce with interest in acquiring Quip. Taylor co-founded Quip in 2012, and Salesforce acquired the product in 2016. Quip-turned-canvas has its roots in the Salesforce-Slack acquisition. “This is a powerful thing we get with channels, which is that the right people are already there.” “It is a more persistent space to organize around this preexisting organization of channels,” said Slack senior vice president of product Ali Rayl. They’ll link to workflows like requesting a work phone, and pull data from Salesforce Sales Cloud. Canvases will be collaborative documents within channels that compile files, checklists and other important information that could previously just be pinned as messages by users. The fruition of that project is Slack canvas.

#Salesforce slack acquisition software

Nate Botwick, formerly VP of product with Quip, oversaw the process of building Quip’s software into Slack. But with steep competition from Microsoft and others, is an underutilized tool that brought Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor into the company the missing link that could help the $27 billion bet pay off? The Quip connection

With Slack, Salesforce made a huge bet on the collaboration space. “I think Microsoft is going to be very aggressive on distribution and pricing over the next few years here.”

“I’m pretty scared if I’m Benioff with Slack, going into a recession,” said Wing Venture Capital partner Zach DeWitt. Then there are challenges from Google, which has its own established workplace suite, and Zoom, which has recently placed a larger emphasis on its chat function. Teams reported 145 million users in 2021. Slack has stopped publicly releasing its user numbers, but even with its most recent daily active user total in 2020, 12 million, Microsoft Teams was eating its lunch at 75 million.

It’s another step toward incorporating Slack into the wider Salesforce family of products, which is critical in a highly competitive communication software space. The biggest Slack-related announcement at Dreamforce will be a feature called Slack canvas, built from Salesforce’s shareable document software Quip.

#Salesforce slack acquisition full

That’s why Salesforce has been heads down since the acquisition, trying to integrate Slack seamlessly with its Sales and Service clouds and across its full suite of products.Īs one of Salesforce’s most visible products, Slack will be front and center at this year’s Dreamforce. While Salesforce may be the de facto CRM for many organizations, “relying on a separate platform (like Webex, Microsoft or Zoom) for collaboration takes users outside of the Salesforce ecosystem,” said Futurum Research analyst Shelly Kramer. Slack not only gives Salesforce access to millions of potential new users, but it helps drive engagement amongst existing customers. The deal, which was one of the largest acquisitions in software history, was Salesforce’s attempt to enter the lucrative collaboration market dominated by the likes of Zoom, Google, Microsoft and others. It’s been just over a year since Salesforce closed its monster $27 billion deal for real-time messaging app Slack.