World News – UK – Salesforce buys $ 28 billion Slack chat app – $ 750 million for UK co-founder Cal Henderson

Deal is one of the largest any software company has ever made as it teams up to take on Microsoft

US tech giant Salesforce is buying the Slack office messaging app for $ 27. 7 billion. GBP (20 GBP). 6 billion. ) in one of the world’s largest software deals of all time.

Salesforce, led by billionaire entrepreneur Marc Benioff, will buy the company with a combination of cash and stocks, it said on Tuesday.

The alliance unites the two Internet companies with Microsoft, the world’s largest software company. It will also result in a $ 2. 5 billion. A stroke of luck for the co-founders of Slack, managing director Stewart Butterfield and UK chief technology officer Cal Henderson. Mr. Butterfield’s stake is valued at $ 1. 8 billion. through the deal and Mr.. Hendersons around 750 million. USD.

Introduced in 2013 to replace cross-company email with a live chat service, Slack quickly became popular with technology startups and media companies. The rise, however, was slowed by Microsoft, which launched a competing service in 2017 and passed it on to hundreds of millions of Office subscribers.

Before rumors of the Salesforce acquisition surfaced last week, Slack’s shares had fallen since going public last year, despite the surge in online business software during the pandemic. At Salesforce worth $ 220 billion. US dollar shares fell 4 percentage points after Tuesday’s announcement.

The companies said the deal would create a software powerhouse for businesses. Salesforce’s main technology known as Customer Relationship Management is used by companies to keep track of sales and communications with customers and customers.

Slack, which originally served as a way for employees to send messages to one another, has set itself the goal of becoming an online command center for work that integrates with other services like cloud storage and word processing. Both were pioneers in cloud software that runs entirely online.

Salesforce announced the deal, saying it would « create the operating system for the new way of working ». . The acquisition is the largest made by Mr. Benioff, who regularly acquired new companies and Time Magazine 2018 for 190 million. USD bought. Salesforce founder was on the verge of buying Twitter but withdrew from negotiations.

The companies expect to conclude the contract before the end of July next year. Mr Butterfield, who will remain with the company, said, « Personally, I believe this is the most strategic combination in software history and I can’t wait to get started. « . ”

Mr Butterfield and Mr Henderson founded Slack in 2009 as a video game company called Tiny Speck before changing direction to focus on the communication tool they developed. The two previously founded the photo-sharing website Flickr, which was sold to Yahoo! in 2005 for $ 25 million.

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Salesforce, Slack Technologies, Customer Relationship Management, NYSE: CRM, Cloud Computing, Warehouse