ACCC To Investigate Salesforce’s Takeover Of Slack

San Francisco, United States - August 24, 2018: Outside Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, located at 415 Mission St. Salesforce is an American cloud computing company with headquarters in San Francisco, California.

Competition watchdog the ACCC is investigating Salesforce’s proposed takeover of Slack.

Last year Salesforce revealed that it would be acquiring the work-chatting service after signing a definitive agreement for a $US27.7 billion ($37.6 billion) takeover.

Salesforce has since revealed plans to integrate Slack’s services within its products.

“Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world. I’m thrilled to welcome Slack to the Salesforce Ohana once the transaction closes,” said Salesforce chair and CEO Marc Benioff.

The ACCC will now be taking an informal review of the takeover, however, and is currently seeking views on the matter.

“Among other things, we are seeking to understand: the availability of alternatives to Salesforce’s CRM solution, and how the alternative CRM supplier differs based on factors such as price, quality and features, the availability of alternatives to Slack’s enterprise collaboration, and how the alternative platform differs based on factors such as price, quality and features, the ability of Salesforce’s CRM customers and Slack’s customers to switch to alternatives (as applicable),” said the ACCC in a statement.

Slack’s VP of communications and policy Jonathan Prince said the companies welcome the investigation.

“We’re happy to work with regulators to ensure that they have a complete understanding of this transaction and why we believe it will be good for competition. We are confident that it will be approved when that process is completed,” he said.

“Most importantly, we want to underscore that our entire business is grounded in open access. We want our customers to have the flexibility to make the best choices for their teams, and we are committed to remaining software agnostic to guarantee exactly that.”

Similarly, the ACCC last year expressed concern around Google’s takeover of Fitbit.

In the United States, the U.S. Justice Department’s Antitrust Division recently asked Salesforce and Slack for more information on the deal.

Despite the additional scrutiny, analysts still expect the deal to be approved in the US before 31 July.

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