Almost $28 billion. I said they should have done this five years ago.
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Salesforce buys Slack
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Last: 3 yr ago by Proposition Joe
I don't get it and based on sell side reaction I'm not the only one.
This ended up being a thesis. Sorry.
My take as an owner and power user of SF in most recent job...
Recall when Chatter was rolled out years ago it was going to be the next big thing in collaboration. They got some momentum after a while with it, but in our organization we could never figure out a good use case for it and never really used it other than for informational status updates. We had a small collaboration use case for a few users that used it for some AGILE work but that was the extent of it. And it doesn't have video.
However, SF pushed this for years as THE collaboration tool. In some regard, it was before it's time but they also basically pushed it as Facebook for work and while that made sense at the time it never evolved much from that.
Why didn't it fully take off as the gold standard?: Most organizations don't use SF on an enterprise level. It's used in silos within certain departments. Thus, you could never get critical user mass with Chatter or collaborating in SF for that matter. Until you have a critical mass of people it's a useless tool.
Then COVID hits. Zoom and MS Teams corner the online collaboration market in about a month.
Why?: MS is already ubiquitous at the enterprise level in most organizations so turning on Teams was an simple rollout and it already integrates with everything else. That's what we did. Turned it on pretty much over night for the entire enterprise. Office 365 is the gold standard for corporate American office apps and that just makes 365 all the more ingrained.
Zoom is also a simple one off tool you can buy and deploy in short order if you need to stand up an online video collaboration tool without much fuss over contracts and deploy time.
Regarding SF, they wants to be the end all be all so this move is not surprising to me. If you have followed them at all, they buy EVERYTHING they haven't already developed on their own to fold it in or kill a competitor. SOP for them. So, right now there is nothing for SF to deploy that meets the video collaboration need as huge as they are (caveat: I'm assuming there is probably something in the app exchange to plug in that will do it but who knows).
And then already sitting out there with a decent level of market share is Slack with a fully fleshed out collaboration tool that actually hit the market ahead of Teams and was the one time golden child for collaboration. Interestingly, I never heard Slack's name mentioned once during all of this. I read an article a few weeks ago that was pointing out how they got left behind during COVID.
SF sees an opportunity to plug a feature hole "overnight" and continue to flesh out their back office universe so they buy Slack. Is the price way high? Maybe. But I completely understand why they are doing it based on their history and vision.
My take as an owner and power user of SF in most recent job...
Recall when Chatter was rolled out years ago it was going to be the next big thing in collaboration. They got some momentum after a while with it, but in our organization we could never figure out a good use case for it and never really used it other than for informational status updates. We had a small collaboration use case for a few users that used it for some AGILE work but that was the extent of it. And it doesn't have video.
However, SF pushed this for years as THE collaboration tool. In some regard, it was before it's time but they also basically pushed it as Facebook for work and while that made sense at the time it never evolved much from that.
Why didn't it fully take off as the gold standard?: Most organizations don't use SF on an enterprise level. It's used in silos within certain departments. Thus, you could never get critical user mass with Chatter or collaborating in SF for that matter. Until you have a critical mass of people it's a useless tool.
Then COVID hits. Zoom and MS Teams corner the online collaboration market in about a month.
Why?: MS is already ubiquitous at the enterprise level in most organizations so turning on Teams was an simple rollout and it already integrates with everything else. That's what we did. Turned it on pretty much over night for the entire enterprise. Office 365 is the gold standard for corporate American office apps and that just makes 365 all the more ingrained.
Zoom is also a simple one off tool you can buy and deploy in short order if you need to stand up an online video collaboration tool without much fuss over contracts and deploy time.
Regarding SF, they wants to be the end all be all so this move is not surprising to me. If you have followed them at all, they buy EVERYTHING they haven't already developed on their own to fold it in or kill a competitor. SOP for them. So, right now there is nothing for SF to deploy that meets the video collaboration need as huge as they are (caveat: I'm assuming there is probably something in the app exchange to plug in that will do it but who knows).
And then already sitting out there with a decent level of market share is Slack with a fully fleshed out collaboration tool that actually hit the market ahead of Teams and was the one time golden child for collaboration. Interestingly, I never heard Slack's name mentioned once during all of this. I read an article a few weeks ago that was pointing out how they got left behind during COVID.
SF sees an opportunity to plug a feature hole "overnight" and continue to flesh out their back office universe so they buy Slack. Is the price way high? Maybe. But I completely understand why they are doing it based on their history and vision.
That's every big acquisition they've made. Exact Target, Mulesoft, etc. It's not just Salesforce, it is almost all acquisitions of this size.jh0400 said:
I don't get it and based on sell side reaction I'm not the only one.
Spot on about SF being used in silos and no critical mass
Real time collaboration has been non existent in SF. Years ago they had a messaging app, but it wasn't adopted or good. This one makes a lot of since. And, Benioff needs to grow revenue and that's easiest via acquisitions.
Yep, that's what they intended for Chatter and it just never took. I tried to find use cases for it with us and I just couldn't get there outside of the very limited use case I mentioned earlier and ultimately gave up on it for the most part.ORAggieFan said:
Real time collaboration has been non existent in SF. Years ago they had a messaging app, but it wasn't adopted or good. This one makes a lot of since. And, Benioff needs to grow revenue and that's easiest via acquisitions.
With this buy, Chatter will get retired or incorporated and/or rebranded into Slack. Coincidentally, Salesforce Slack rolls off the tongue so it will make sense for them to go all-in on Slack as their full collaboration tool.
Disagree. Different use cases. Chatter isn't real time, it's like email. Chatter is used for discussions over days/weeks. Chatter definitely has it's uses when adopted properly. But, like you mentioned, it works best when everyone is on it and that only happens at Salesforce. Chatter on objects is great though.YouBet said:Yep, that's what they intended for Chatter and it just never took. I tried to find use cases for it with us and I just couldn't get there outside of the very limited use case I mentioned earlier and ultimately gave up on it for the most part.ORAggieFan said:
Real time collaboration has been non existent in SF. Years ago they had a messaging app, but it wasn't adopted or good. This one makes a lot of since. And, Benioff needs to grow revenue and that's easiest via acquisitions.
With this buy, Chatter will get retired or incorporated and/or rebranded into Slack. Coincidentally, Salesforce Slack rolls off the tongue so it will make sense for them to go all-in on Slack as their full collaboration tool.
Slack is real time and already integrates with Salesforce in some ways. What is needed is launching Slack directly in Salesforce, especially when you look at things like Service Cloud.
Agree with your use cases differences. My argument is that when Chatter came out they were pushing it as THE future of collaboration right or wrong.ORAggieFan said:Disagree. Different use cases. Chatter isn't real time, it's like email. Chatter is used for discussions over days/weeks. Chatter definitely has it's uses when adopted properly. But, like you mentioned, it works best when everyone is on it and that only happens at Salesforce. Chatter on objects is great though.YouBet said:Yep, that's what they intended for Chatter and it just never took. I tried to find use cases for it with us and I just couldn't get there outside of the very limited use case I mentioned earlier and ultimately gave up on it for the most part.ORAggieFan said:
Real time collaboration has been non existent in SF. Years ago they had a messaging app, but it wasn't adopted or good. This one makes a lot of since. And, Benioff needs to grow revenue and that's easiest via acquisitions.
With this buy, Chatter will get retired or incorporated and/or rebranded into Slack. Coincidentally, Salesforce Slack rolls off the tongue so it will make sense for them to go all-in on Slack as their full collaboration tool.
Slack is real time and already integrates with Salesforce in some ways. What is needed is launching Slack directly in Salesforce, especially when you look at things like Service Cloud.
Salesforce is the spawn of satan
My main complaint about salesforce is the idiots I work with that call it SFDC. I mean they vocally call it SFDC. In writing, sure use the acronym. But when you are ****ing talking to me why would you say "ess eff dee sea" instead of salesforce?
Let them know they dropped the DC years ago. I've thrown out resumes for people putting the .com in there.Duncan Idaho said:
My main complaint about salesforce is the idiots I work with that call it SFDC. I mean they vocally call it SFDC. In writing, sure use the acronym. But when you are ****ing talking to me why would you say "ess eff dee sea" instead of salesforce?
Why? Most of the people that have a problem with it are users that had a crappy implementation of it. That's not on Salesforce.Picard said:
Salesforce is the spawn of satan
ORAggieFan said:Why? Most of the people that have a problem with it are users that had a crappy implementation of it. That's not on Salesforce.Picard said:
Salesforce is the spawn of satan
Salesforce is like every other enterprise platform from Notes to SAP.
If you don't have a dedicated staff focused on caring and feeding it and if you believe your accounts payable customer management, whatever process is a competitive advantage and the software needs to bend to your current processes, instead of the other way around; you are in for a bad time.
ORAggieFan said:Let them know they dropped the DC years ago. I've thrown out resumes for people putting the .com in there.Duncan Idaho said:
My main complaint about salesforce is the idiots I work with that call it SFDC. I mean they vocally call it SFDC. In writing, sure use the acronym. But when you are ****ing talking to me why would you say "ess eff dee sea" instead of salesforce?
I had an interview with them last year....it was a reach for my background but it was the single most professional recruitment experience I had since on campus recruitment. Just everything about it was first rate, fair, and well communicated.
Yeah, I worked there about five years and still have many friends there. Have been to 8 Dreamforce's (plus interviewed during one). A lot different now then when I joined and it was 8000 employees.Duncan Idaho said:ORAggieFan said:Let them know they dropped the DC years ago. I've thrown out resumes for people putting the .com in there.Duncan Idaho said:
My main complaint about salesforce is the idiots I work with that call it SFDC. I mean they vocally call it SFDC. In writing, sure use the acronym. But when you are ****ing talking to me why would you say "ess eff dee sea" instead of salesforce?
I had an interview with them last year....it was a reach for my background but it was the single most professional recruitment experience I had since on campus recruitment. Just everything about it was first rate, fair, and well communicated.
Is Dynamics a good replacement for Salesforce? We've been with Salesforce for 5-6 years but I hate how they try to screw your on every product add-on. It's always a big dance to negotiate price...
Premium said:
Is Dynamics a good replacement for Salesforce? We've been with Salesforce for 5-6 years but I hate how they try to screw your on every product add-on. It's always a big dance to negotiate price...
It depends. It can be cheaper and right for some. Depends what clouds you're using. You also need to know how to negotiate with Salesforce.
ORAggieFan said:Premium said:
Is Dynamics a good replacement for Salesforce? We've been with Salesforce for 5-6 years but I hate how they try to screw your on every product add-on. It's always a big dance to negotiate price...
It depends. It can be cheaper and right for some. Depends what clouds you're using. You also need to know how to negotiate with Salesforce.
My best negotiating seems to come when I ignore them after showing interest and talking about how they need to give me good pricing to allow us to scale.
Small company here - 13 licenses, about 7 sales cloud and 5 service cloud and 1 that has both. We are in the $110 per month range on average for Enterprise.
Was trying to get CPQ and they are around $52 right now. They may go 10% lower but that's about it.
13 users? Why not Freshworks, Zoho, or Hubspot?
Do you really need Enterprise? BTW, Service gives you everything Sales has, shouldn't be extra cost for a user that has both. Only reason different licenses is to allocate commissions to Service AEs.Premium said:ORAggieFan said:Premium said:
Is Dynamics a good replacement for Salesforce? We've been with Salesforce for 5-6 years but I hate how they try to screw your on every product add-on. It's always a big dance to negotiate price...
It depends. It can be cheaper and right for some. Depends what clouds you're using. You also need to know how to negotiate with Salesforce.
My best negotiating seems to come when I ignore them after showing interest and talking about how they need to give me good pricing to allow us to scale.
Small company here - 13 licenses, about 7 sales cloud and 5 service cloud and 1 that has both. We are in the $110 per month range on average for Enterprise.
Was trying to get CPQ and they are around $52 right now. They may go 10% lower but that's about it.
CPQ can be a bit of a monster. Shoot me a PM if you have any questions. Not my area of expertise, but I run the team for us that is the experts.
ORAggieFan said:Do you really need Enterprise? BTW, Service gives you everything Sales has, shouldn't be extra cost for a user that has both. Only reason different licenses is to allocate commissions to Service AEs.Premium said:ORAggieFan said:Premium said:
Is Dynamics a good replacement for Salesforce? We've been with Salesforce for 5-6 years but I hate how they try to screw your on every product add-on. It's always a big dance to negotiate price...
It depends. It can be cheaper and right for some. Depends what clouds you're using. You also need to know how to negotiate with Salesforce.
My best negotiating seems to come when I ignore them after showing interest and talking about how they need to give me good pricing to allow us to scale.
Small company here - 13 licenses, about 7 sales cloud and 5 service cloud and 1 that has both. We are in the $110 per month range on average for Enterprise.
Was trying to get CPQ and they are around $52 right now. They may go 10% lower but that's about it.
CPQ can be a bit of a monster. Shoot me a PM if you have any questions. Not my area of expertise, but I run the team for us that is the experts.
I don't know for sure if we need enterprise, how do they handle someone downgrading? I feel like they'd rip me off and give me list price.
We "add on" Xant for sales and we integrate Email to Case Premium and Ring Central for service.
Also open to something outside of cpq. Basically just need a simple quoting / contract management system for a new product line. Partly one time costs and partly monthly subscriptions. Generate quote, send, sign, manage contract changes and lifecycle. Not the biggest need right now since it's a new product for us and not huge volume yet.
Best option is to use it to swap and keep contract the same. Or wait until renewal. As a customer as well I feel the pain. We are small and gave about 300 licenses.
I use Slack quite a bit, but it's still crazy to me that someone took circa 1998 mIRC, fancied it up a bit, and convinced people it was a billion dollar idea.
Proposition Joe said:
I use Slack quite a bit, but it's still crazy to me that someone took circa 1998 mIRC, fancied it up a bit, and convinced people it was a billion dollar idea.
The idea isn't worth billions, the corporate adoption is.
Yeah I get it... It's just such basic software that has been around for decades.
Kudos to them for packaging it and selling it though.
Kudos to them for packaging it and selling it though.
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