Obviously determined to get as much from its monster investment as possible, salesforce.com (CRM 1.95%) plans to center its entire operations around Slack. Last December, Salesforce bought Slack Technologies (WORK +0.00%), the operator of the hot namesake office-messaging app, in a monster deal valued at $27.7 billion. That was by far Salesforce's largest acquisition, and a huge buyout by any standard.
Salesforce's plans were revealed by CEO Marc Benioff in an interview with Yahoo! Finance Live. During the discussion, Benioff said that, "We're going to rebuild all of our technology, once again, to become Slack-first to help our customers have a harness to work in this new world -- where you're working at home; you're working in the office; you're working at events; you're working anywhere."
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Salesforce is anticipating that because of the coronavirus pandemic, the work environment has changed considerably. Many jobs will continue to be done from home, and tying together home and office teams with a convenient instant-communications app like Slack will be a necessity. The app is extremely popular, so reforming the ever-evolving Salesforce around it makes a great deal of sense.
Salesforce doesn't technically own Slack Technologies and its core asset yet, but both should officially be in the company's portfolio very soon. Its owner-to-be anticipates the deal will close in Q2.
Benioff didn't provide any estimates for how much the planned reconfiguration might cost. His company is doing well and has money in the bank -- it managed to grow revenue by 23% on a year-over-year basis in its most recently reported quarter to almost $6 billion, while its free cash flow swelled by 44% to $3.4 billion.
