Salesforce.com Inc. plans to announce its reported plans to acquire Slack Technologies Inc. on Tuesday after the markets close, CNBC reported today.

The reported timing suggests that the announcement will likely coincide with Salesforce’s quarterly earnings call, which is also scheduled after Tuesday’s closing bell. The sources who spoke to CNBC also said that the cloud giant will pay for the acquisition half in cash and half in stock. The price tag, they added, will value Slack at “at a premium.”

The tipsters’ information lines up with the Wall Street Journal report last week that broke the acquisition talks between Salesforce and Slack. The Journal cited insiders as saying that the deal, if it happens, would value the team chat provider at a premium to its market capitalization at the time, which was about $17 billion. 

Slack closed its most recent quarter with revenue of $215.9 million, a small fraction of the $5.25 billion in quarterly sales that Salesforce is expected to report on Tuesday, according to the Zacks Consensus Estimate. But Slack is growing rapidly: The $215.9 million it brought in last quarter amounted to a 49% year-over-year jump. Meanwhile, its team chat platform serves as a key communications tool for a large and growing portion of the world’s biggest organizations.

The upwards of $17 billion that Salesforce is reportedly preparing to bet on the acquisition suggests that it sees a strategic opportunity in Slack’s enterprise installed base. Buying Slack would enable it to create more competition for key rival Microsoft Corp., whose Microsoft Teams service is widely used in the enterprise. The deal may also create opportunities for Salesforce to enhance its core customer relationship management platform.

This year, Salesforce and Slack introduced an app that lets joint users view customer records from Salesforce’s CRM in the chat window. In the event of an acquisition, the companies could likely be expected to bring their products even closer together.

It’s even possible Salesforce may bring deeper Slack integrations to other products besides its flagship CRM. Salesforce-owned data visualization platform Tableau, for example, can be connected to Slack with the help of certain third-party products, but no straightforward native integration is currently available, which might change in the wake of the deal.

Slack’s market capitalization has climbed from about $17 billion right before word of the acquisition talks emerged last week to more than $23 billion this morning. Based on the sharp increase in the company’s value, it would appear that Wall Street expects that Salesforce will offer a considerable premium over last Slack’s unaffected share price. 

The deal would be Salesforce’s largest acquisition ever, easily topping the $15.3 billion it paid for Tableau last year. 

Photo: Slack