The move caps an acquisitive streak by Salesforce and ends Slack's run as an independent publicly traded company
The New York Stock Exchange floor on the day of the initial public offering of Slack, the workplace collaboration company, in Manhattan, June 20, 2019. Salesforce on Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020, said it would buy the workplace software company Slack for $27.7 billion in cash and stock, the latest in a wave of deals as the coronavirus pandemic boosts demand for tools that enable people to work remotely.
Image: Brittainy Newman/The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — Salesforce on Tuesday said it would buy the workplace software company Slack for $27.7 billion in cash and stock, the latest in a wave of deals as the coronavirus pandemic boosts demand for tools that enable people to work remotely.
If completed, the acquisition would mark the end of Slack’s brief run as an independent publicly traded company — it went public in mid-2019 — and cap an acquisitive streak by Salesforce with its largest deal since it was founded 21 years ago.
The deal is the biggest bet among a recent spate of acquisitions made by tech companies to capitalize on the shift to remote work. Adobe last month said it planned to acquire the workforce management software company Workfront for $1.5 billion. In July, Atlassian, which sells tools for developers and project management, said it would buy the enterprise services business Mindville for an undisclosed amount.
Other firms focused on workplace collaboration products, including Airtable, Asana, Box, DocuSign, Dropbox and Smartsheet, may also be potential targets as highly valued software companies look to roll up the fragmented market for collaboration tools.
The Salesforce deal for Slack shows how competitive the software market has become, said Logan Purk, a senior analyst with financial advisory firm Edward Jones. Without a “game-changing product” and a lot of capital, he said, “you’re going to get swallowed up or you’re going to fail.”
©2019 New York Times News Service