Credit: Dreamstime
A plan of action for channel development is underway for Slack to engage with the Salesforce partner ecosystem and align with the next wave of industry solutions.
Following the 2020 announcement of Salesforce's US$27.7B acquisition of enterprise communication platform provider Slack, the integration of services and programs is in full swing.
The acquisition gave Slack access to Salesforce's global partner ecosystem, including its Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) partners where Slack previously had little reach.
At the time, Salesforce said the combination of Slack’s offering with Salesforce Customer 360 will create the “operating system for the new way to work, uniquely enabling companies to grow and succeed in the all-digital world”.
US-based Richard Hasslacher, Slack’s vice president of global alliances and channels, has been with the business for six years. He joined Slack from Salesforce where he spent nine years in channel leadership roles in Europe and the US.
His role is to build out the global partner ecosystem, and post-Salesforce acquisition Hasslacher has been focused on “harmonising” the program and creating a phased approach to “activating the Salesforce ecosystem on Slack to build out their Slack capacity and capabilities”, he said when speaking with Reseller News.
Recently the two partner programs across Salesforce and Slack were integrated with the aim of having a single platform for all partners. This will be fully unified by 1 February, Hasslacher said.
Slack has already made this change on their end, considering any Salesforce partner to be now a Slack partner, and this has been the main focus of the team post-acquisition according to Hasslacher.
This joining of partner ecosystems and leaning into Salesforces' Australia and New Zealand partner presence has allowed Slack to tap into local markets where the presence was not previously strong.
Slack is focused on “proactively” engaging with a subset of Salesforces’ ecosystem as well as scaled enablement to reach all partners locally. This includes the likes of global system integrators such as Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, PwC and Capgemini.
“We’re looking at enabling the partner ecosystem to understand how Slack fits into the Salesforce Customer 360. I think the acquisition happened at a particularly good time – the market is scrambling, agnostic of geography or industry sector, to really figure out what their work model looks like," he said.
“A lot of our focus has been helping these partners understand how to think about Slack as a platform, over and above messaging, being that aggregation and orchestration layer that creates a richer, integrated experience across - not just across our customer's investment in the Salesforce portfolio of products, but also across their full software stack.”
On the current market and economic uncertainty, Hasslacher is confident that historic trends and patterns show customers fall into two categories – those that are a little reluctant to invest and prefer to wait out perceived headwinds, and those that see technology as the key catalyst to help them through this period.
“We see a lot of customers who are really eager to look at technology as a way to help them become more efficient in these times, and I think Slack is an investment they’re making that makes the rest of the software that they have more valuable, because it is enabling different ways of working,” he said.
