"This is a stellar exit strategy for Slack," said Kate Leggett, an analyst at Forrester Research. "Microsoft Teams is eating Slack's lunch."
But 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. 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 got many hooked on new online tools.
"I think the pandemic's played a massive role" in paving the way for the deal, Ives said. "The Zooms, the Slacks, the Microsoft Teams, that's going to be a new part of the workforce."
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.
Slack and Salesforce are headquartered about a block away from each other in San Francisco. Slack's office is in the shadow of the 62-story Salesforce Tower, the city's tallest building.