Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff said the ‘union’ of Salesforce and Slack is a “Marriage Made in Heaven” after they successfully acquired Slack in a massive $27.7 billion deal last December 2020.
“We could not be more excited about this combination and how it transforms our customer 360 vision to let our customers work from anywhere. It’s just the most exciting thing I’ve been through.” he said in an interview with Bloomberg. The American Internet Entrepreneur, also the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Salesforce, has a net worth of $7.8 billion as of 2020. He currently owns more than 3% of Salesforce shares that are worth around almost $5 billion.
Salesforce.com, Inc.(NYSE: CRM) is a cloud-based software company that brings customers and companies together. Through their One Integrated Customer Relationship Management Platform, they are able to provide customer relationship management solutions that give all the departments whether it be sales, marketing, commerce or service, a single distributed view of every customer.
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On the other hand, Slack Technologies Inc.(NYSE: WORK), is an International Software Company that develops and designs a platform used for global communication purposes, that provides real-time messaging, archiving, file sharing, and many more.
“Salesforce has really never been stronger”. The 56-year-old announced that they were able to deliver a ‘phenomenal’ quarter and was able to raise their guidance to $21.1 billion at the end of 2020 while also noting their $25.5 billion projected revenue for this year.
“It’s the fastest-growing enterprise software company ever of all time,” proclaimed Marc, while saying that the current status of their company today is their strongest version ever with the addition of Slack. According to Marc, the scheme to collaborate and to extend more channels have integrated their products. For him, the idea that we can have this ‘next generation’ work from home, at the beach, in a coffee shop, and basically in anywhere environment, is pretty amazing and is very much ‘possible’. “Slack is going to be literally the icing on the cake making everything better,” said Marc.
The CEO stated, their company was able to transform from a few hundred million dollars to a couple of billion dollars. He mentioned that there are billions of dollars in Slack’s revenue and tremendous market share gains since they have acquired the company. “With Slack, we’re going to execute and deliver tremendous value to our global customers.”
Marc said that he was shocked when he was able to know that Slack’s CEO, Stewart Butterfield, and his Chief Operating Officer, Brett Taylor have known each other for a very long time. “They just showed me a vision that’s so compelling and our customers are going to be so inspired by what they can do from productivity and the level of customer success,”. He stated that a lot of their customers badly need their core products during the pandemic and that is why they’ve had such tremendous growth last 2020. According to Marc, Stewart Butterfield is going to stay at Slack with the exact organizational model as before they acquired this company.
“We’re seeing a huge digital transformation. We’re seeing the pandemic accelerate the digital world, especially the digital world with customers.”, he marked, talking about how this current situation has transformed the world.
As per Slack, Marc said that the ‘Slack Experience’ which is a very popular user interface, will be really ‘augmented’ by the data workflow of their recent collaboration. “When I saw the original demos and prototypes to what our two products look like together, I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh. I’m gonna be so much more productive. I can work from anywhere and I’m deeply connected into all of my customer experiences.'”. He mentioned that he uses salesforce every day to do his sales, to do his service, to do marketing, and analytics. All of these are now also appearing right inside Slack, in a new product called ‘Slack Connect’. “I’m so happy to be able to tell you this today. I’m so excited since I first heard the potential to get something like this done,” said Marc.
“We have this vision of Social Enterprise. This idea is exactly as I just articulated.” He talked about how he anticipated these collaborative user interfaces, collaborative applications, and collaborative ecosystems, be built on top of these huge customer data lakes. “This idea, that ‘this’ was possible has always been our dream.” said the CEO.
On a final note, here’s what Marc Benioff has to say about their alliance with Slack technologies. “Now that Slack has kind of come along, it’s that vision of collaboration, and they added things that we could have never imagined especially with how they’ve integrated into everything like zoom and so you’re able to have these great new products, productivity environment, and I think customers are going to just love this.”.
