Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) To Acquire Slack Technologies (NYSE:WORK) To Match Growing Competition

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) is reportedly in discussions to acquire work messaging app company Slack Technologies (NYSE:WORK). With the acquisition, the company aims to bridge partnership with service, sales, and cloud and expand Salesforce’s reach.

Salesforce to combine with Slack to take on the competition

Slack’s proposed purchase is more about competition in the space rather than about growth and product roadmaps. During the pandemic, sales and services went virtual, and that has remained largely the same, which has benefitted Slack. More companies and businesses rely on information systems to keep track of workers during the COVID-19 pandemic leading to the massive adoption of Slack services. Since the beginning of the year, the Slack app has been installed 12.6 million times, almost 50% up compared to last year.

Slack offers more than just chat services as it allows organizations to embed workflows. Therefore it will perfectly fit into the Salesforce suite marketing, product sales, and services. It is important to note that the biggest CRM rivals, such as Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT), have collaboration platforms.

Rivals forming collaborations to take on Salesforce in CRM

Research Company Da Davidson and Co.’s Rishi Jaluria said that Microsoft Teams has leveraged opportunities better than Slack since they offer the service free as a bundle. For instance, Microsoft Teams is integrated with a platform play and Office 365. On the other hand, Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE), which recently acquired Workfront, can easily integrate project management platform with the cloud. Microsoft, C3.ai, and Adobe formed a competitive CRM axis to take on Salesforce.

It seems that with With this growing competition, Slack realized that it could get more penetration by working with a large company like Salesforce. On its side, Salesforce, which is yet to nail a collaboration in the industry, has seen Slack’s acquisition as a logical way of expanding its enterprise offerings. Slack’s ability to bridge partners and companies through Slack Connect will be a great addition to Salesforce, whose Customer 360 solution only runs within the boundaries of the enterprise.