What Salesforce’s Slack Acquisition Means for the Collaboration and CRM Ecosystem

CRM giant Salesforce acquired the widely-used collaboration tool, Slack. Far from business as usual, Slack apps will be forced to adapt and prioritize scalability and security, while Salesforce customers will enjoy the continued development of the CRM powerhouse, says Chris Buttenham, founder and CEO, Obie.

In its eight-year history, Slack has been steadily growing momentum towards becoming a trusted business communications platform. In the last couple of years, Slack saw an explosion in both users and profit. This included a jump from 6 million usersOpens a new window at the end of 2017 to 12 million by the end of 2019. Of course, what no one could have fully anticipated was the pandemic and its longevity. The result has been that Slack has very much become a lifeline to vast swaths of businesses around the world. Slack is now the center of major business discussions and daily water cooler banter.

Slack’s rise has resulted in Salesforce acquiring the company for the impressive amount of $27.7 billion at the end of 2020Opens a new window . However, this sale does not just impact the teams at Slack and Salesforce. For years now, third-party developers have created apps to further expand Slack’s capabilities. So what can these third-party Slack apps expect? And what does this acquisition mean for Salesforce customers? 

What the Transition Means for Slack Apps

Third-party apps operating within the Slack ecosystem are not as fringe as some people may think. As it stands, Slack claims that there are more than 2,200 complementary appsOpens a new window in their application directory for third-party developers. That means there are approximately 885,000 developers working on applications for Slack’s platform every day.

Salesforce is the pioneer of app exchange and app directories. This is an intriguing development for the Slack ecosystem as a whole and confirms what many Slack stack customers have believed — that this is a budding powerhouse. Also, by incorporating all the elements that have made Salesforce great, Slack apps become more dependable as there is an inherent increase in their security and scalability. 

How Slack Apps Can Adapt to Their New Ecosystem

While there are 2,200 complementary apps in Slack’s universe, it does not remotely touch the extent of Salesforce’s offerings and products. Salesforce’s ecosystem has seen millions of companies built using their platform. Because Salesforce is a much more mature ecosystem, third-party app developers will need to pivot to have their products be compatible with Salesforce. This includes a need for Slack to be a cloud-based platform to cater to the many companies they now support. 

This may be difficult to adjust to initially, but Salesforce’s more robust ecosystem will eventually allow Slack apps to go upmarket and be more enterprise-ready. Devs and third-party app businesses are going to be forced to add new layers of complexity to their product. This will become a necessity to meet the higher demands of major clients. As it stands, deployment of Slack and Slack apps would be possible for large companies but often not practical. This is because the organization itself could very well have tens or hundreds or maybe thousands of individual workspaces. So, for devs, the challenge will be to make sure that their product is “Slack Enterprise Grid” compatible. This means that products must be able to integrate with this tool which connects multiple interconnected workspaces from within a single company.

Some Slack apps can be viewed as “one-trick ponies”. Basically, some third-party company’s offerings are seen as a convenience tool or more of an add-on than a fully fleshed-out product. Third-party developers will need to offer a more versatile product to survive Slack’s transition into Salesforce. 

This means various changes to the scope and scale must be made quickly. These companies have been presented with an opportunity to dream beyond what their product was first made to do. This mentality shift will separate the third-party developers who are happy standing pat with the others who realize they have been given a chance to build a billion-dollar product on the Salesforce-Slack platform.

Learn More: 10 Tips to Use Slack Like a Pro (in 2020 & Beyond)

What This Means for Salesforce Customers

Salesforce is already a dominant figure in the tech world. As of 2019Opens a new window , Salesforce has a 19.5% market share in the world customer experience and relationship software (CRM) market. That number is about twice that of their nearest competition, SAP. However, there are some that believe that Salesforce was reaching its peak in their go-to sales and marketing automation vertices. 

Potential Salesforce customers can view this acquisition as proof that Salesforce is keen to not plateau. While they do have a major hold on the CRM market, they also seem to recognize the need to put distance between them and their competition. Although Microsoft has not been Salesforce’s main competition, their Dynamics platform and its ability to integrate with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Office make it a very intriguing product to watch in the CRM market. By acquiring a communications and collaboration platform like Slack, customers can be assured that if they were to purchase Salesforce’s product, they would be receiving as robust a CRM operations system as offered on the market. 

This acquisition comes at such a key juncture of work platforms’ history because as things have transitioned to a remote environment — and may transition back only to a hybrid working model — teams have found inefficiencies in our current working system. One of those is email. With messaging platforms, like Slack, being a more instantaneous and convenient service than email, we could be seeing a seismic shift towards products like Slack being the preferred method of communications in the workplace. Also, with the safety of email being unreliable — scams and breaches involving phishing and identity theft are a risk — Salesforce now has a product to solve those worries. Slack and Slack Connect could very well be the dominant form of communication for the majority of companies in a short period.

For a potential consumer on a journey to buy a new CRM platform for their company, Salesforce seems to have sealed what could have been a massive hole in their product moving forward. 

Learn More: 5 Purpose-Built Collaboration Apps To Secure Enterprise Communications

How Slack Apps Can Adapt: A Roadmap

Many app developers will be given a product outlook that is entirely different than what they have seen before — or for smaller companies, CTOs will be faced with abandoning much of the original architecture of the product they first envisioned. Leaders in the space must be able to communicate that this is an opportunity for every member of the team to make a name for themselves rather than sighing and viewing the Salesforce as an inconvenience that must be dealt with. 

The third-party Slack apps that survive and thrive are going to be the ones that quickly identify what needs to be changed on the tech side (Slack Enterprise Grid and adding complexity to their offerings) and then present an updated vision for success. By accomplishing those first two steps, these apps will set themselves up to then take advantage of their new parent company. Third-party teams will be able to leverage a massive increase in potential partners, and with the Salesforce/Slack name, product marketing will be easier than ever. 

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