Salesforce’s $27.7 billion acquisition of team chat software vendor Slack was announced last week, with CEO Marc Benioff heralding the deal as a “match made in heaven” for the two companies.
There are some clear upsides for both vendors. Salesforce can tap into a collaboration platform used daily by millions of knowledge workers and open a new front in its battle with Microsoft, while Slack gets to reignite its slowing growth under the ownership of a cloud giant with a global network of enterprise sales staff.
But what does the acquisition mean for the 142,000 businesses already using Slack, and the 12 million users who fire up the application each workday?
Any acquisition involves a degree of uncertainty for existing customers, and Salesforce’s buyout of Slack is no different.
Stuart Melling, business development director at 34SP.com, a UK-based WordPress hosting business and longtime paid Slack customer, welcomed the deal, with the caveat that he hopes “little changes about the product experience itself.”
