The big news in the tech world this week was Salesforce, the customer relationship management giant, completing its acquisition of Slack for $27.7bn.
As we noted in September, on paper Slack is exactly the kind of company that might have "done a Zoom" in 2020 as remote work and biz communication tools exploded in usage and popularity. Thanks to competition from Microsoft (and others) that didn't quite happen, leaving its share price roughly where it was at the start of the year... until Salesforce swooped in with an offer for the whole thing.
Good at selling, better at buying
Salesforce might pay its bills by helping its customers sell and manage client relationships, but its own corporate strategy has been a lot more focused on buying. The Slack deal is Salesforce's biggest yet, and it comes just 16 months since Salesforce splashed $15.7bn on buying Tableau — the analytics and data viz software.
A lot of acquisitions end up being poor deals for the acquiring company. Too much ego, too much "empire-building" on the behalf of management or simply paying too much for the target company means that a lot of deals are often regretted 2, 3 or 4 years down the line. Maybe $27bn and change is too much to pay for Slack, a company that only does ~$230m of revenue per quarter. But, if any tech company has proven it knows how to buy and integrate big deals — it's Salesforce.
