Possible Salesforce Slack buy set to shake up CX space

Microsoft rivalry heats up

Salesforce and Microsoft have been in turns friends and fierce rivals over the years. Buying Slack -- which has an open antitrust case against Microsoft in Europe that alleges Microsoft's tying Teams and Office together illegally stanches competition -- probably won't help relations between the two companies.

It isn't likely to hurt that much either, Jakovljevic said. Salesforce Marketing Cloud runs on Azure, and because Salesforce and Microsoft apps integrate well for customers who use tools from both companies, the Slack acquisition adds up to "co-opetition as usual."

A key concern in any acquisition where Salesforce steps outside of its sales, marketing, e-commerce and customer service comfort zone is: What happens to the acquired company's customers who aren't interested in Salesforce? For Slack users, that probably won't be an issue, France said, because Salesforce will likely want to keep them around. After all, many large organizations use both Slack and Teams for different departments and different workflows.

Jakovljevic agreed, pointing to another recent acquisition.

"Tableau, too, has lots of non-Salesforce customers, and I don't think Salesforce would be dumb enough to annoy and lose those customers," Jakovljevic said.

Partners, rivals weigh in

Slack hasn't grown during the pandemic's work-from-home surge as much as other collaboration apps. That was likely because Slack lacked a video component, said Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist at Zoho. The two companies are CRM rivals, but Zoho's business applications nevertheless integrate with Salesforce for companies that use both.

By some metrics, Teams had overtaken Slack in daily users late last year, before the pandemic's social distancing necessitated office closings and, by extension, more video conferencing meetings. Vegesna said Zoho's own video platform has seen five to ten times increased usage, depending on whether it is for one-on-one calls, team meetings or webinars.

"That probably explains why Slack wants to wants to exit now, while the going is good," Vegesna said.

It will be interesting to see how competitors such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP respond to Salesforce's Slack acquisition, said Dustin Grosse, chief marketing and strategy officer at Nintex, a workflow process management vendor that also is a Salesforce partner.

"I suspect that low-code digital process automation to drive stronger interoperation between CRM, ERP, HR and unified collaboration platforms -- like Slack and Teams – will be the next focus area," Grosse said.

Neither Salesforce nor Slack responded to request for comment.