The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) announced that it won’t be opposing the proposed acquisition of Slack. The agency led by Rod Sims said that it is unlikely the acquisition might result in Salesforce preventing rivals of Slack in team collaboration solutions from competing effectively. It also said that the rival of Salesforce in customer relationship management (CRM) solutions will not be competitively disadvantaged.

American cloud-based CRM software company Salesforce announced in December 2020 that it plans on acquiring Slack for USD27 billion as the two companies want to take on Microsoft, the owner of Teams collaboration solution, and see a sizable market traction along with user adoption at that time.

More on Salesforce acquiring Slack

Under the agreement, shareholders of Slack are to receive $26.79 per share in cash and 0.0776 shares of Salesforce common stock per Slack share. This will be representing an enterprise value of about $17.7 billion. The value is based on the Salesforce’s closing price of common stock as on November 30th 2020.

As per Salesforce’s announcement about the acquisition, Salesforce and Slack together will be giving companies a “Single source of truth” for their business along with a single, unified platform for connecting employees, partners and customers with each other along with their everyday apps, all in their existing workflow.

The announcement by Salesforce said that Salesforce is the #1 (Number 1) CRM solution that allows companies to sell, market, service and conduct business from anywhere. Slack essentially brings people, tools and data in one place so that teams can easily collaborate and get work done from anywhere. 

Slack Connect impressively extends Slack’s benefits of enabling collaboration and communication between a company’s employees and all its external partners, from customers to vendors. 

Through this acquisition, Slack’s solutions will be deeply integrated into every Salesforce Cloud. As Salesforce Customer 360’s new interface, Slack will be transforming how people collaborate, communicate and take action on customer data and information across Salesforce.

SEE ALSO: Wipro acquires Ampion in a $117 million deal

Rod Sims on approving Salesforce-Slack acquisition

ACCC chair Rod Sims said that Slack and Salesforce mostly provide different solutions with distinct purposes, so there’s minimal direct competitive overlap between the two.” 

“We focused on whether Salesforce having both CRM and team collaboration solutions could give rise to a substantial lessening of competition.” 

Sims said that most of the interested parties had raised no concerns over the acquisition and that market participants said they will switch CRM providers if Salesforce engaged in anti-competitive bundling or foreclosure conduct, like Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and Adobe. 

Due to commercial and reputational risks, We consider that Salesforce might be unlikely to disadvantage competitors by “degrading interoperability” between the CRM solution of Salesforce and team collaboration solutions of competitors, or even between the team collaboration solution of Slack and rival CRM solutions,” said Sims.

SEE ALSO: US Fintech Stripe acquires Y Combinator startup Bouncer

For more latest IT news and updates, keep reading iTMunch

Image Courtesy:  Business photo created by zaozaa09 – www.freepik.com