Salesforce buys Slack for $27.7 billion in 8th largest tech acquisition of history

Salesforce, the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software providing tech giant that has been listed as the 6^th best company to work for by Fortune magazine, has acquired Slack in a deal amounting to $27.7 billion. Slack is a communication platform specialized for the workplace to provide efficient coordination that has been around since 2013 but never really managed to take off.

The acquisition is the 8th largest tech acquisition in history and the largest software company acquisition ever.

• Dell buys EMC ($67 billion, 2015)
• NVIDIA acquires Arm ($40 billion, 2020)
• Avago buys Broadcom ($37 billion, 2015)
• AMD acquires Xilinx ($35 billion, 2020)
• IBM acquires RedHat ($34 billion, Oct)
• HP buys Compaq ($33.6 billion, 2001)
• SoftBank buys ARM ($32.3 billion, 2016)
• Salesforce buys Slack ($27.7 billion, 2020)
• Microsoft buys LinkedIn ($26 billion, 2016)

Salesforce has reportedly acquired Slack to enhance and integrate the communication platform into its CRM software to provide a better user experience. Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff said, “This is a match made in heaven. Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world.”

CEO of Slack, Stewart Butterfield, said, “As software plays a more and more critical role in the performance of every organization, we share a vision of reduced complexity, increased power and flexibility, and ultimately a greater degree of alignment and organizational agility. Personally, I believe this is the most strategic combination in the history of software, and I can’t wait to get going.”

Slack was not doing very well in 2020 as Microsoft Teams had gained huge popularity for workplace communication. Its share price was going down with the company incurring $147.6 million in losses in the first two quarters of 2020.

Image Source: Boss Hunting