![]() The street seemed to feel the same ahead of this news as the stock had been slow to rebound and had seen adverse reactions to its most recent earnings reports. This led me to believe that Slack would be unlikely to ever return to the triple-digit growth rates and the needed revenue growth of six and seven-figure monthly enterprise customers and, therefore, no real path to profitability. Slack, a company that I have largely been critical of, not due to its technology, but its lack of growth while the likes of Zoom, Cisco, and Microsoft exploded during a year where employees and students everywhere were forced to work at home. Thanksgiving holiday, the reported news that Salesforce may be in to complete its largest deal to date, acquiring Slack kept the market on its toes through the close. Salesforce, whose stock closed down 5% on Wednesday, is scheduled to release its fiscal third-quarter earnings next week.Īnalyst Take: On what was expected to be a rather tame day for business, just ahead of the U.S. Shares of Slack closed almost 38% higher Wednesday after the Wall Street Journal first reported that Salesforce held talks to buy the company. Slack's office is in the shadow of the 62-story Salesforce Tower, the city's tallest building.The News: Salesforce is in talks to acquire Slack, and a deal could be announced as soon as next week, according to a person familiar with the matter. Slack and Salesforce are headquartered about a block away from each other in San Francisco. Ives said Benioff was also running out of time to catch up to Microsoft, which remains a secondary player in Salesforce's core customer-relations-management business, known as CRM, but way ahead in providing a broader array of cloud-based services. "The Zooms, the Slacks, the Microsoft Teams, that's going to be a new part of the workforce." "I think the pandemic's played a massive role" in paving the way for the deal, Ives said. She said the need for customer-relations agents and other Salesforce users to swarm around a topic and collaborate remotely has only grown with the coronavirus pandemic that has sent so many office workers home and has gotten many hooked on new online tools. "Microsoft Teams is eating Slack's lunch."īut Leggett said it's also "really good for Salesforce" to add a popular collaboration tool to its own software suite, which is focused on managing customer relationships for businesses and government agencies. "This is a stellar exit strategy for Slack," said Kate Leggett, an analyst at Forrester Research. Before news reports of a potential deal with Salesforce surfaced last week, Slack's stock was still hovering around its initial listing price of $26 when the company went public nearly 18 months ago. Slack, on the other hand, hasn't proven as popular with investors, even though its service that publicly launched in 2014 is being increasingly used by companies and government agencies looking for more nimble alternatives than email. Microsoft for one has developed its own thriving online suite of services, known as Office 365, which includes a Teams messaging app that includes many of the same features as Slack's 6-year-old application. But software as a service has become an industry standard that has turned into a gold mine for longtime software makers. Salesforce's outspoken founder and CEO Marc Benioff hailed the "cloud computing" concept as the wave of the future to much derision initially. ![]() The San Francisco company was one of the first to begin selling software as a subscription service that could be used on any internet-connected device instead of the more cumbersome process of installing the programs on individual computers. The acquisition, announced Tuesday, is by far the largest in the 21-year history of Salesforce. ![]() Business software maker Salesforce will acquire work-chat service Slack for $27.7 billion in a deal aimed at giving the two companies a better shot at competing against longtime industry powerhouse Microsoft. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |