Butterfield sees a natural connection between what people do in the course of their work, what machines do
behind the scenes in these systems of record and engagement, and how Slack can help bridge the gap between humans and machines.
He says that by putting
Slack in the middle of business processes, you can begin to eliminate friction that occurs in complex enterprise software like Salesforce. Instead of moving stuff through email, clicking a link, opening a browser, signing in, and then finally
accessing the tool you want, the approval could be built into a single Slack message.
If you have hundreds of those kinds of actions a day,
theres a real opportunity to increase the velocity and that has an impact, and not just in the minutes saved by the person doing the approval, but the speed of how the whole business operates, Butterfield said.
Competing with Microsoft
While neither executive said
the deal was about competing with Microsoft, it was likely an underlying reason that the companies decided to join forces. They may prove better together than they are separately, and both have complicated histories with Microsoft.
Slack has had an ongoing battle with Microsoft and its Teams product for years. It filed suit against the company last summer in the EU over what it
called unfairly bundling of Teams for free with Office 365. In an interview last year with the Wall Street Journal, Butterfield said that he believes Microsoft sees his company as an existential threat. Hyperbole aside, there is tension and
competition between the two enterprise software companies.
Salesforce and Microsoft also have a long history from lawsuits in the early days, to
making friends and working together when it makes sense after Satya Nadella took over in 2014, while still competing hard in the market. Its hard not to see the deal in that context.
In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Battery Ventures general partner Neeraj Agrawal said the deal was at least partially about catching Microsoft.
To get to a market cap of $1 trillion, Salesforce now has to take MSFT head on. Until now, the company has mostly been able to stay in its own swim
lane in terms of products, Agrawal told TechCrunch.
As for Butterfield, while he saw the obvious competition, he denied the deal was about putting
his company in a better position to compete with his rival.
I dont think that was really an important part of the rationale, at least for
me, he said, adding the competition with Microsoft is overblown. The challenge for us was the narrative. Theyre just good PR or something that I couldnt figure out, he said.
While Butterfield cited a list of large clients in enterprise tech, insurance and banking, the narrative has always been that Slack was favored by developer
teams, which is where it initially gained traction. Whatever the reality, with Salesforce, Slack is definitely in a better position to compete with any and all comers in the enterprise communications space, and while it will be part of Salesforce,
the two companies also have to figure out how to maintain some separation.
Keeping Slack independent
Taylor certainly recognizes that Slacks current customers are watching closely to see how they handle the acquisition, and his company will have to walk
a fine line between respecting the brand and product independence on one hand, while finding ways to create and build upon existing hooks into Salesforce to allow the CRM giant to take full advantage of its substantial investment.
It wont be easy to do, but you can see a similar level of independence in some of Salesforces recent
big-money purchases like MuleSoft, the company it bought in 2018 for $6.5 billion, and Tableau, the company it bought last year for over $15 billion. As Butterfield points out, those two
companies have clearly maintained their brand identity and independence, and he sees them as role models for Slack.