CRM giant Salesforce has approached Slack for a potential acquisition, according to a new Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report. A Dow Jones report suggests that any such deal will value Slack “at more than its current market capitalization of $17 billion”, making it the CRM company’s largest acquisition ever. The collaboration service’s shares rose sharply since the news broke, going up almost 30% at one point. However, the WSJ does add that there is no “guarantee” of the talks leading to a deal.
It is not clear what the status of the talks currently are, but a potential purchase would mean that Salesforce will end up competing with the likes of rival Microsoft’s Teams and various other remote collaboration offerings. A source familiar with the matter told Reuters that the firm looks at the purchase as a “logical extension of its enterprise offerings”.
While Slack’s CEO has said that the company does not see Teams as a threat in the past, the Redmond giant’s offering has since gathered momentum, especially with the advent of the pandemic pushing enterprise customers to work remotely.
While Slack has attracted some enterprise customers recently, it could benefit greatly from a potential Salesforce influence to further grow in the enterprise sphere, while also providing a path for Salesforce to reach smaller businesses through the service.
It will be interesting to see how these talks pan out between the two companies and what benefits such an acquisition brings to both the companies.
Source: The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Reuters