Salesforce integrating Slack with Customer 360

Salesforce released new capabilities to integrate business communication tool Slack across its products and solutions to improve collaboration in organisations that work in hybrid—office and remote—environments.

Salesforce, which is the world’s largest customer relationship management (CRM) software company, had announced its plans to acquire Slack for $27.7 billion in December last year.

“Our mindset about work has shifted from a place you go, to something you do,” said Bret Taylor, President and Chief Operating Officer of Salesforce.

Salesforce had launched integrations across sales, service, marketing, and analytics last month, and is now integrating Slack with its Customer 360—a tool that allows companies to connect Salesforce apps. Majority of its products, including commerce, experience, platform, will use Slack to help organisations in creating digital headquarters (HQ) to enable flexibility and productivity while working.

“This is really Slack and Customer 360 coming together. We're bringing every product into this digital HQ,” Taylor said in a call with the media.

The integrations would help Salesforce’s customers collaborate better. It helps the CRM software giant offer alternative and simplified ways of communication other than emails across teams and organisations.

It will also push up Slack’s users, as the company leverages its parent’s presence in the market. In 2020, Salesforce had a 19.5 percent share in the worldwide CRM market, according to Gartner, a technology research and advisory firm.

“About the vision for how Slack integrates with the rest of Salesforce, it's pretty simple and it's pretty bold — we want to integrate Slack across every Salesforce, (and) every industry solution,” said Stewart Butterfield, CEO and Co-Founder of Slack.

This will help Slack, which grew slowly compared to Microsoft Teams in the last five years. When Microsoft announced the launch of “chat-based workspace” in November 2016, Salesforce had 4 million users.

Microsoft used its 365 bundle as the distribution medium, which helped it scale it to 115 million daily active users by the end of 2020, according to Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said in an earnings call last year. By then, Slack reportedly grew to around 12 millions users.

The company also launched Slack Clips, which allows teams to create, share, and consume video and audio content in channels. It introduced GovSlack for enterprises that need a higher level of compliance.

Salesforce will bring Hyperforce, its infrastructure to support Customer 360 platform globally, on public cloud, to over 15 regions around the world by the end of 2022, Taylor said in the call with journalists.

India is Salesforce’s second-largest employee base outside of the United States. In India, the company is not just focusing on growing its employee base, but also the customer base, Taylor said.

On Monday, Salesforce Ventures—the venture capital arm of Salesforce—invested an undisclosed amount in Indian fintech startup Razorpay to “further strengthen its presence in the business banking space.”

“There's more to come there,” Taylor noted. “India is a priority market for us. And, we're really invested into that ecosystem.”