U.S. antitrust regulators cleared the deal this week,
allowing the creation of a stronger challenger to Microsoft Corp, the top
workplace software provider whose Teams app competes with Slack for market
dominance.
The merger partners hope the deal will bolster efforts to
connect their joint customers to smooth out common business deals, Salesforce
President Bret Taylor and Slack Chief Executive Stewart Butterfield said in an
interview on Wednesday.
They also want to reduce the complexity of using hundreds of
different cloud-based apps that have crept into workplaces, they added.
For example, a Slack "channel" can be created to
replace all the emails, phone calls and video conferences that might otherwise
occur between a sales team doing a deal with a procurement team at another
company. Thousands of apps work with Slack, so documents from third-party
platforms like Google Drive can be signed in the channel with services like
DocuSign Inc, Taylor said.
"We did the due diligence for the Slack acquisition in
Slack," Taylor noted.
"I joked it had the highest billable hours of any
channel ever, because we had all the lawyers in there and the investment
banks," he said, but "it was really a transformative
experience."
While analysts view Teams as Slack's largest rival,
Butterfield said Slack will continue to integrate with the Microsoft app in
line with its goal to make it easier for employees to get things done.
"What customers want is interoperability. They don't
want to have to make hard choices," Butterfield said. "We'll
integrate with everyone - Microsoft and Salesforce, of course, but also
ServiceNow and Workday, and more or less anyone you can think of."