Salesforce Channel Partners Look For Slack Integrations Ahead of Acquisition Closing

“Recently, a CEO at one of our customers told us that the insights gathered from the dashboard powered by Tableau, with MuleSoft integrations, was providing the single most value of any IT project in the past few years,” Doug Shepard of AllCloud said.

The Salesforce acquisition of Slack is nearing its close and some partners of the San Francisco-based cloud software vendor have already fit the collaboration app into their products and services.

And if they haven’t yet, Salesforce’s track record with acquisitions has them eager to find a place for Slack.

[RELATED: Salesforce Is ‘About To Pass SAP’ As Largest Enterprise App Company: CEO Marc Benioff]

Gerry Szatvanyi, CEO of OSF Digital -- which is based in Quebec and has offices in San Francisco, New York and Massachusetts -- told CRN that the Salesforce partner has already worked Slack into its Salesforce portfolio for customer support and service cases.

OSF, which just closed a $43 million funding round that included Salesforce as an investor, has seen its Salesforce revenue grow north of 30 percent year over year. To continue the growth, OSF has invested in hiring, training and research and development.

OSF’s Salesforce clients are attracted to products and services that create “a holistic view of the customer journey, putting together tech in a way that doesn‘t create silos,” Szatvanyi said. “Creating smart and connected commerce journeys -- that’s what resonates, in a nutshell.”

On Dec. 1 Salesforce announced a deal to acquire collaboration application vendor Slack for $27.7 billion in the biggest acquisition in the vendor’s history and one of the IT industry’s largest. Salesforce completed its acquisitions of ExactTarget in 2013, MuleSoft in 2018 and Tableau in 2019.

Salesforce products and services from Tableau, MuleSoft and ExactTarget are all driving revenue for Salesforce partner AllCloud, Doug Shepard, the company’s president of North America, told CRN. AllCloud -- which has offices in Tel Aviv, Denver, Romania and Germany, and is No. 181 on the 2021 CRN Solution Providers 500 list -- even heard that Tableau reached a milestone with one of its customers.

“Recently, a CEO at one of our customers told us that the insights gathered from the dashboard powered by Tableau, with MuleSoft integrations, was providing the single most value of any IT project in the past few years,” Shepard said. “‘I want more of this,’ were her closing words on the call.“

Gireesh Sonnad, CEO of New York-based Salesforce channel partner Silverline, told CRN that his company has seen business opportunities from Tableau and MuleSoft and that he looks forward to learning how he can leverage Slack.

He said that Salesforce took a few years before ExactTarget was seamlessly integrated into Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud. Now, Marketing Cloud has been a conversation starter for Silverline in winning new customers.

MuleSoft has helped with conversations with clients in industries such as health care with a need to migrate from legacy systems. Tableau has helped with up-selling services related to data insights.

And Silverline is still exploring possibilities on Slack-related services, but it may not be until next year that those come to fruition, Sonnad said.

“Salesforce does a good job of bringing together these different products to one platform,” Sonnad said. “We’re always looking for more integrations. Making these different products run smoother is always appreciated. But that’s part of the natural evolution.”

On a call with analysts Thursday to discuss Salesforce’s latest quarterly earnings, CEO Marc Benioff said that eight of the top 10 deals of the quarter included Tableau. MuleSoft was part of five of the top 10 deals. He also brought out multiple executives to discuss the vendor’s integration strategy with its various products and services.

“Our successful integrations of ExactTarget and Tableau and MuleSoft continue to drive these incredible results for our customers and give us so much confidence in this pending Slack acquisition,” Benioff said. “We‘re seeing more and more inclusion of Tableau and MuleSoft in our large deals as customers accelerate their digital transformations.”

Salesforce CFO Amy Weaver told analysts that Tableau was in more than 60 percent of Salesforce’s seven-figure-plus deals. She also said that the Slack acquisition is expected to close “near the very end” of the second quarter.

Product and services integrations will fuel Salesforce’s Customer 360 product as the foundation to clients’ digital-workplace experience, Salesforce President and Chief Operating Officer Bret Taylor told analysts. The company’s seven-figure deals on average include more than four clouds. In April, the company’s Einstein AI software started doing more than 100 billion predictions a day. MuleSoft is doing almost 5 billion integration transactions a day, up 28 percent from the previous quarter.

“If you see the numbers, the strength is really across the portfolio,” Taylor said. “When we talk about the fact that of those seven-figure deals, they, on average, included more than four of our clouds, we‘re not selling individual products.”

According to a report from investment bank KeyBanc, Tableau pulled in $394 million in sales for the quarter, up 38 percent year over year. MuleSoft brought in $380 million, up 49 percent year over year.