The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will not oppose the proposed acquisition of enterprise collaboration platform Slack by global supplier of customer relationship management (CRM) software Salesforce.
“Salesforce and Slack mostly supply different software with distinct purposes, so there is minimal direct competitive overlap between them,” ACCC Chair Rod Sims says.
“We focused on whether Salesforce having both CRM and team collaboration solutions could give rise to a substantial lessening of competition.”
The ACCC concluded that it is unlikely that the acquisition would result in Salesforce preventing Slack’s rivals in team collaboration solutions from competing effectively.
It did not consider it likely that Salesforce’s rivals in CRM solutions would be competitively disadvantaged.
“Most interested parties raised no concerns," Sims says.
"Market participants said that if Salesforce engaged in anti-competitive bundling or foreclosure conduct, customers could switch to alternative CRM solutions, including global enterprise software companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Adobe.
"Similarly, customers could switch to alternative team collaboration solutions, such as Microsoft Teams.
“We consider, due to commercial and reputational risks, that Salesforce would be unlikely to disadvantage competitors by degrading interoperability between Salesforce’s CRM solution and competitors’ team collaboration solutions, or between Slack’s team collaboration solution and competitors’ CRM solutions.”
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