Salesforce Buys Slack for $27.7 Billion — And the Cloud Wars Get Real
Salesforce announced a $27.7 billion deal to acquire Slack, one of the biggest software acquisitions ever, right as AWS wrapped re:Invent.
Yesterday Salesforce announced it’s buying Slack for approximately $27.7 billion. Let that number sit for a second — this is one of the largest software acquisitions in history, and it’s happening to a company that was, not that long ago, a scrappy messaging app born out of a failed video game project. Slack has come a long way, and now it’s about to become part of one of the biggest names in enterprise software.
The timing is interesting too. The deal landed right as AWS wrapped up its re:Invent conference, held virtually this year because, well, 2020. That juxtaposition isn’t an accident in my mind. Even if the two events aren’t formally connected, they both point to the same underlying story: the fight for enterprise customers is intensifying, and it’s no longer just about who has the best cloud infrastructure. It’s about who owns the entire workflow — infrastructure, apps, and now the communication layer that glues teams together.
Why Slack, why now
Salesforce is fundamentally a CRM company, but it’s spent years building out a broader platform play — sales tools, service tools, marketing tools, analytics. Slack fills a gap that’s become impossible to ignore in 2020: how do distributed teams actually talk to each other and get work done. With so many companies operating remotely this year, workplace messaging isn’t a nice-to-have anymore, it’s core infrastructure. Owning that layer gives Salesforce a much stickier relationship with its customers, and a direct channel into daily workflows rather than just backend data.
There’s also the Microsoft angle that’s hard to ignore. Microsoft Teams has been eating into Slack’s market share, bundled as it is with Office 365 subscriptions that most large companies already pay for. Slack alone was fighting an uphill battle against that kind of distribution advantage. Under Salesforce’s wing, Slack presumably gets integrated across the Salesforce ecosystem — sales reps chatting about deals, customer service teams coordinating in real time, all without leaving the Slack interface. Whether that vision materializes cleanly is a different question, since integrating a beloved standalone product into a much larger enterprise software company doesn’t always go smoothly.
What this means for the rest of us
If you’re a developer or IT admin who relies on Slack’s API and integrations, it’s worth watching how this shakes out over the coming months. Big acquisitions like this can go a couple of ways: either the acquired product keeps its identity and gets more resources, or it slowly gets absorbed and reshaped to fit the parent company’s priorities. Slack has a famously loyal developer and power-user community, and how Salesforce handles that community will say a lot about their intentions.
Zoom out, and this deal is really a signal about where enterprise software is heading — full-stack platforms trying to own every touchpoint a business has with its own employees and customers. Combined with the cloud infrastructure battles that AWS just showcased at re:Invent, it feels like we’re watching the pieces of an all-encompassing enterprise stack get assembled in real time, deal by deal. I’ll be curious to see whether Microsoft or others respond with acquisitions of their own before the year is out.