Salesforce apparently wants to expand its product portfolio to include audio and video conferencing services: As the Wallstreet Journal reports, the provider of countless corporate cloud services is negotiating with the 14 Billion euro company Slack Technologies on its takeover.

Slack, operator of the groupware service of the same name with currently 130. 000 paying corporate customers, sees itself pushed to the wall by Microsoft, because this is the competing product teams meanwhile standard component of its Microsoft office platform 365 and thus, in the opinion of Slack, hinders competition.

Communication platform By incorporating it into the much larger Salesforce, the Slack developers could continue their original concept of adding interfaces with services from other providers, such as those for web storage like Dropbo x, Google Drive or GitHub. This is in contrast to the Microsoft philosophy of realizing all imaginable functions exclusively with its own products.

Since the company was founded, Salesforce has not only positioned itself as a software developer for corporate web services, but also as a platform for marketing Applications that their customers have developed and made available to other customers. The company has its own groupware products at the start with Chatter and Quip, but these have so far been entirely geared towards allowing users to communicate with each other via text messages and documents.

Expansion of the portfolio Slack, on the other hand, also enables audio and video calls and has just announced that it will soon have a push-to-talk mode and more to support so-called stories. These are video clips that can be used to pre-produce and possibly replace a brief appearance in a video conference. With Slack, Salesforce could close a gap in its service offering and strengthen its position vis-à-vis competitor Microsoft today Thursday a jump of almost 30 percent upwards.

(hps)