Covid has revealed and accelerated business life. It reveals cracks in businesses’ foundations or shines a light on underlying strengths. On the flip side, it has most definitely accelerated the transition to the future of work being closer to today than tomorrow. The work-from-anywhere, communicate in whatever way you want future is now today. Zoom is now part of the lexicon in a way we’d never have expected in February. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned about the future of work from the pandemic, it’s that collaboration is king; you need to be able to collaborate regardless of geography, time zone, work station setup, you name it. The centrality of collaboration to the future of work has never been more evident… all the more so with the recent announcement of Salesforce acquiring Slack.

Collaboration raised to the power of enterprise

Slack is, at its core, a product company. They built an elite product for the internet generation that only happened to target how we do business. Oracle or SAP or Microsoft build mission-critical software, sure… but they’re often rather clunky platform that are counter-intuitive or an outright pain to navigate. Slack, on the other hand, didn’t start as an enterprise company, but rather built a great product folks loved to use, and then went after an enterprise clientele.

Salesforce, on the other hand, is part of that software culture more so than it is a product culture. They’re one of the best CRMs out there, but that wasn’t a particularly high bar to surpass when they came to market. They’ve excelled in the enterprise space for what they offer, but the deeply ingrained product mindset of Slack is a welcome addition to a majority-enterprise, well, enterprise.

But what does it indicate about the larger question concerning the future of work?

Collaboration is king, and it’s coming to a business near you.

The future of work is now

There’s all sorts of business reasons why Salesforce wanted to add Slack to its mix. It didn’t have a messaging product, the Slack app ecosystem and integrations are great, the year-over-year revenue growth is encouraging, etc. etc. etc. But what the move shows about the future of work for the rest of us is that the biggest companies in the country realize the massive value of enabling and empowering the collaboration of the future.

Now, neither Salesforce nor Slack might be the right collaboration tool for your individual company or use case. But mergers of this scale and impact tell us something larger about the business climate in which we operate. In this moment, it proves the centrality of remote collaboration as a core tenet of the future of work.

When it comes to your technology stack and making sure your collaboration is on point, that’s where we come in. Give us a ring and see how we can ensure your business can be the best business it can be.