Salesforce Acquires Acumen Solutions
And yes, Slack ...
Salesforce acquired Acumen Solutions today.
This is going to get buried by the $27B acquisition of Slack but this is significant for 2 primary reasons:
Acumen is a Professional Services organization with ~1,000 employees, so while the price tag pales in comparison to what they paid for Slack, this was still a meaningful investment.
It suggest that Salesforce may see the need to get more involved in delivering services to their ecosystem of customers, which is an area they had actively stepped away from in recent years.
Acumen had a particularly large focus on Public Sector, Financial Services, and Manufacturing, positioning them as an attractive complement to the industry focus of Vlocity.Salesforce is projecting that Acumen will contribute $150m in FY22 revenue. Again, this suggests a deviation from their hands-off approach to professional services as they look to more aggressively bring vertical solutions to market.
Why did Salesforce acquire Slack?
👉 Salesforce needs to maintain it's YOY growth rate, finding new products to upsell & cross-sell, and often achieves this through acquisitions (Tableau, MuleSoft). During their earnings call, Salesforce estimates that Slack will contribute $600m in revenue for FY22.
👉 Acquisitions that extend platform functionality are great but Salesforce has long been after a tool that is more deeply ingrained in user's daily lives (hence attempts at Twitter, LinkedIn)
👉 Slack has a strong developer community and experiments effectively with bots, app development, and low-code technology - all nice complements to Salesforce.
👉 Slack's revenue growth has slowed dramatically from 82% in 2019 to an expected 38% in fiscal 2021 -- Salesforce has an enterprise customer base largely untapped by Slack, so there is opportunity to immediately unlock massive deals.
👉 Slack does have real value to the core Salesforce product roadmap - as always, it will take time, but should make a powerful addition to Salesforce Anywhere (Quip).
👉 Collaboration tools have a major switching cost once adopted company-wide, which make them effective for customer retention. Microsoft Teams has 115 million daily active users and simply put, Salesforce needs an answer.