Salesforce to buy enterprise Chat Company Slack to expand business

Salesforce is now all geared up to buy enterprise chat company Slack as part of a plan to expand its products for businesses, according to the Wall Street Journal.  The acquisition discussions were reported on Wednesday and follow Slack's difficulties in capitalizing on the shift to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic.Unlike Zoom and Microsoft Teams, Slack hasn't benefited from the rise in demand for video meetings during the pandemic.

Slack's revenues are based on the number of seats it sells to each customer. Its Q2 revenues took a hit from customers that have downsized or shut down as a result of the pandemic, as well as from spending cutbacks by larger customers.Salesforce is a dominant player in the customer relationship management (CRM) market and has partnered with Slack for years. It's also a competitor to Microsoft's Dynamics 365 CRM. 

But video meetings could be less important to Salesforce than chat. Last year, Salesforce created a Slack app that allowed Salesforce customers to share customer records within Slack.Both Salesforce apps enable business users to share customer data with colleagues, a task that is better suited to chat than video. So Salesforce could benefit from having control of its own enterprise messaging platform and from the hundreds of enterprise apps that integrate with Slack's chat functionality.