According to a Press release of the Salesforce group, the international provider of Cloud Computing-solutions company to acquire messenger service Slack for $27.7 billion. The purchase price will be settled in cash and shares of Salesforce stock. Currently, Slack's is valued at about $24 billion. The eponymous software developed by Slack is a free collaboration tool that can be extended with various cloud services for payments. The free version only includes basic functions such as video calls with only two participants and text chats.
The takeover of Slack by Salesforce is one of the most extensive takeovers in the tech industry. Comparable are the purchase of LinkedIn by Microsoft for $27 billion and the acquisition of Red Hat by IBM for $34 billion In response to the takeover announcement, Slack's share price has risen 38 percent. Instead of the The Wall Street Journal reported takeover sum of 17 billion US dollars, Salesforce must therefore now pay 27.7 billion US dollars for Slack.
Focus on data protection
In recent months, Salesforce has been in the media spotlight, primarily due to data protection concerns. These led to class action lawsuits being filed against both Salesforce and its competitor Oracle in the Netherlands and the UK. In these lawsuits, the companies are accused of monitoring users with unauthorized tracking cookies.
Slack, on the other hand, tries to win new customers for its service with a focus on data protection. To this end, the company operates a data center in Francewhich can be used as the primary data storage facility at the request of the customer. Even the largest competitor in the area of collaboration tools, Microsoft Teams, will offer exclusive use of German data centers upon request from the beginning of 2020. Whether Slack or Microsoft teams also join the European Cloud Initiative Gaia-X or think about it in the Public Cloud of the Schwarz Group Capacities to rent are not yet known.
