Salesforce.com Inc.’s
CRM,
acquisition of Slack Technologies Inc.
WORK,
would be a major challenge to Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
one analyst said Wednesday, following a report of a possible deal in the works, and may set off a wave of software acquisitions. “This deal would be a major shot across the bow at Microsoft with the company’s Teams offering a direct messaging competitor against Slack that has been a clear hurdle to growth and now would be a two horse race between Microsoft and Salesforce,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives in a note Wednesday. Microsoft already butts heads with Salesforce, which specializes in customer relationship management software, with its Dynamics 365 CRM service. Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack could also set off a string of software company acquisitions across the tech industry well into next year, Ives said. “This would also have a ripple impact for Google
GOOG,
GOOGL,
and its cloud endeavors and put more pressure on [Google Cloud CEO Thomas] Kurian and GCP to do a collaborative cloud deal over the next 3 to 6 months to keep pace with the likes of Amazon
AMZN,
Microsoft, and Salesforce.” Slack shares were last up more than 23%, while Salesforce shares were down about 3%. Slack shares closed Tuesday at $29.58 giving the company a market cap of $16.89 billion. The report was not the only shake-up in the cloud industry Wednesday as Amazon’s AWS public cloud service was experiencing a major outage, grounding many online services that depend on it.