Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff says the company is “not seeing any material impact” from the uncertain global economy. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) Salesforce revenue rose 24% to $7.4 billion in quarterly results that investors were watching closely for clues about the direction of corporate technology spending amid concerns about the direction of the global economy. “So far, we’re just not seeing any material impact from the broader economic world that all of you are in,” said Marc Benioff, the Salesforce founder and co-CEO, on a conference call discussing the company’s fiscal first q ..read more

Mark Nelson was named Tableau Software CEO in March, leading the Seattle-based company as part of Salesforce, filling a vacancy created by the departure of his predecessor, Adam Selipsky, to become the new Amazon Web Services CEO. (Tableau and GeekWire Photos) Seattle-based Tableau Software is no longer an independent publicly traded company, but it’s back under the watchful eyes of Wall Street for a different reason. Salesforce bought the data visualization company for more than $15 billion in 2019, its largest acquisition at the time. Now, with Salesforce close to completing its acquisition ..read more

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff speaks at CES in Las Vegas. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) Seattle-based Tableau Software generated $394 million in revenue for Salesforce in its first fiscal quarter, up 38% from a year ago. That’s up significantly from Tableau revenue growth of 15% in early 2019, in the data visualization technology company’s final earnings report as an independent operation. Salesforce completed the $15.7 billion acquisition in August 2019. Tableau was involved in eight of the San Francisco-based company’s top 10 customer deals for the recent quarter. Salesforce graphic, disclos ..read more

Shuffle co-founders Chris Watts (left) and Mathew Lee. (David Rzegocki Photo) Two years ago, while Matthew Lee was on a sabbatical between jobs, he reflected on his career highlights. “There are certain jobs that I had that I really loved, and some were just a job,” Lee said. “The key component was the people.” That got him thinking about the ways he could use technology to improve work experiences for others by helping people engage with their colleagues. He perused his professional and personal network and realized that his childhood friend Chris Watts had made a tool that randomly matched p ..read more

[Update, Monday afternoon: Slack is back after its morning outage. On its system status page, the company offers instructions for any users still experiencing problems. The cause hasn’t been identified, but Slack says it plans to issue an update summarizing the issue.] If you weren’t ready to return to work on Monday morning, you weren’t alone: neither was Slack, apparently. The communication and collaboration service suffered a widespread outage just as workers were returning to their virtual workstations after the long holiday. As of publication time, Slack is back for some users, but the co ..read more

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and Away co-founder Jennifer Rubio. (Instagram Photo via @Jennifer) Three weeks into his $27.7 billion honeymoon phase with Salesforce, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield’s real wedding could have an unwelcome guest of sorts, in the form of rival Microsoft Teams. The ironic, collaboration-software-technology twist was delivered in a tweet on Monday by Butterfield’s fiancée, Jen Rubio, co-founder and president of the luggage brand Away. Rubio said that she and Butterfield — described by some as Silicon Valley’s newest “it” power couple — were planning to get married vir ..read more

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Salesforce strikes a deal to acquire Slack for $27.7 billion; Amazon Web Services makes some surprising news at its annual re:Invent cloud conference; and a new tech giant arrives in our backyard. Matt McIlwain. (Madrona Photo) Joining us on this episode is Matt McIlwain, managing director at Seattle-based venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group, offering his commentary on the implications of these developments for the region, and for the world of cloud and enterprise technology. McIlwain invests in software and data-oriented companies in areas ..read more

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. (Microsoft, Slack and Salesforce Photos, GeekWire Illustration.) Slack could gain new inroads to enterprise customers, and access to additional sales and marketing horsepower, if reports of its impending acquisition by Salesforce come to fruition. The combination promises to address one of Slack’s biggest relative weaknesses in its competition with its largest rival, Microsoft Teams. The Redmond company’s collaboration technology benefits from Microsoft’s existing relationships with big businesses and ..read more

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. (Slack Photo) New language in Slack’s quarterly regulatory filing warns investors that Microsoft could retaliate against the workplace collaboration company over its antitrust complaint against the tech giant. Slack’s latest 10-Q filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, made public Tuesday along with its quarterly earnings report, includes this unusual line: “Furthermore, we could be subject to retaliatory or other adverse measures by Microsoft, its employees, or agents in response to the complaint that we filed with the European Commission.” The ..read more

Slack delivered a surprise this week with the filing of an antitrust complaint against Microsoft, alleging that the tech giant unfairly leverages Microsoft Office to give an edge to its Teams collaboration software. Microsoft responded with a pointed jab of its own, highlighting Slack’s subpar video conferencing experience and its own investments in that area. What are Slack’s chances, and what will be the key issues considered by regulators? And does this mean Microsoft is back in the antitrust hot seat? That’s our first topic on this week’s GeekWire Podcast. In our second segment, we share ..read more