Tag: Slack

Salesforce rehires staff it booted out

After laying off 8,000 employees earlier this year, Salesforce wants to rehire about 40 per cent of them again.

More than 3,300 new employees will be hired, including some recently told to clean their desks.

Workers needed include engineers, sales and cloudy experts.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that the outfit knew it had to hire thousands. This is a little odd, given that he thought he had to fire 8000 in January due to a bad case of economic headwinds and budget tightening.

Salesforce’s buyout shows market for collaboration tools growing

Salesforce logoSalesforce’s decision to buy Slack for $27.7 billion is proof that the collaboration tools space is becoming vital to the market, according to one of its rivals.

Matthew Hodgson, CEO of Element, another secure collaboration platform said: “Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack is an interesting move for the company and validates the continued demand for collaboration tools in the market.”

He said that the move fuels the rivalry between Microsoft and Slack, which escalated recently when Slack filed an antitrust complaint against the former for unfairly using Office to promote Microsoft Teams. If Slack are to successfully compete, they need to join an open ecosystem for collaboration.

AWS and Slack take on Microsoft

AWS and Slack have united in a project to take on Microsoft Teams.

The multi-year deal will see Slack migrate all of its audio and video call capabilities to Amazon’s Chime platform, which competes with the likes of WebEx and Zoom. Slack already used AWS as its “preferred cloud partner”.

Under the deal Slack will pay AWS at least $425 million for hosting between now and May 2025

AWS will adopt Slack internally as part of the deal, and encourage developers to manage their AWS environments on Slack’s messaging platform.

Slack raises shedloads of cash

Slack has raised $427 million in Series H funding and is now valued at $7.1 billion.

The latest cash comes from Dragoneer Investment Group and General Atlantic, and is in addition to the $841 million the company has raised since its launch in 2013.

The workplace communications app currently claims to have eight million daily active users across 500,000 organisations, as well as three million paid users.

Slack has been under attack over the last couple of years, with Microsoft and Facebook both launching competing products.

In a blog posted on its website, Slack said: “We pursued this additional investment to give us even more resources and flexibility to better serve our customers, evolve our business, and take advantage of the massive opportunity in front of us.”

The US-based company is becoming increasingly global, with more than half of its users now coming from outside of the US.

Italy is Slack’s fastest growing market outside of America, while Japan has recently surpassed the UK as the firm’s second largest market, based on the number of daily active users.