While most of the focus on the acquisition of Slack this week by Salesforce for $27.7 billion clearly revolves around digital business transformation initiatives, the implications of the deal for DevOps teams that have been employing Slack to collaborate for years is significant.
Salesforce owns both Heroku and Force.com in addition to providing developers with a set of low-code Lightning tools for building applications on top of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications built by Salesforce.
During a conference call with analysts this week, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made it clear most of the initial focus will be on tightening integration between Slack and the company’s broad portfolio of customer relationship management, marketing, analytics and artificial intelligence software. However, Slack first gained traction as a collaboration service that DevOps teams employed to share updates and notifications. Many DevOps teams still employ Slack for that purpose and it’s only a matter of time before all the units that make up Salesforce tighten integration with Slack.
It’s not clear to what degree that integration might convince DevOps teams to either stay with or switch to one of the several platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments that Salesforce makes available. However, the Lightning PaaS that Salesforce provides for organizations that want to extend the company’s SaaS applications has been gaining significant traction. Rather than writing entire applications from the ground up, the path of least digital business transformation resistance for many organizations is to employ low-code tools such as Lightning to extend existing SaaS applications.
Salesforce also own MuleSoft, which it positions as a platform for integrating both SaaS and on-premises applications to further those digital business transformation initiatives.
That approach has gained significant traction in the last six months as organizations have expanded reliance on SaaS applications to enable employees to more easily work from home to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic. For its most recent third quarter, Salesforce posted revenues of $5.42 billion, an increase of 20% year-over-year. Benioff said the company is now lifting its future guidance to slightly exceed pre-pandemic levels. Salesforce is projecting fiscal 2021 revenue at the end of its fourth quarter will total $21.11 billion. Revenue guidance for fiscal 2022 has been raised to $25.5 billion.
Most of the custom applications being built on top of Salesforce platforms are constructed by professional developers. That shift toward employing Salesforce SaaS applications as a platform has created demand for DevOps platforms from providers such as Copado and Gearset. Most recently, Gearset has begun offering free training to encourage the adoption of best DevOps practices among developers of applications based on the Salesforce platform.
Benioff said the first fruits of the acquisition of Slack will manifest themselves next year. In the meantime, DevOps teams that have standardized on Slack for collaboration should expect to be hearing a lot more about Salesforce tools and platforms on a Slack channel near them.
Of course, none of this is lost on Microsoft, which is similarly moving to incorporate Microsoft Teams within DevOps workflows. It will be up to each individual DevOps team to decide which approach to collaboration makes the most sense from here.
