Having just finished reading my colleague Irwin Lazar’s UC-oriented take on the potential intentions behind Salesforce’s announced acquisition of Slack, I’m driven to take fingers to keyboard to offer a different perspective.
The notion of bringing communications together with customer data is not a new one. In 1999 — the same year that Salesforce was founded — Nortel acquired Clarify, a major CRM company. The rationale for today’s acquisition is similar — but presumably with a much greater probability of success. One reason is that cloud infrastructures will allow the technical integration of each company’s solutions to happen relatively seamlessly.
