“It’s fair to say over the next 18 months every SI (systems integrator) and ISV (independent software vendor) solution will have Slack as a part of it,” Slack channel chief Richard Hasslacher tells CRN in an interview.
More than a year after the close of Salesforce’s $27.7 billion acquisition of collaboration application Slack, Slack channel chief Richard Hasslacher and his team have been at work helping the subsidiary’s earliest partners gain certifications and develop industry-focused services to bring to market.
His prediction is that Slack will be part of every solution from Salesforce system integrators (SIs), Hasslacher – whose formal title is Slack’s vice president of global alliances and channels – told CRN in an interview.
“It’s fair to say over the next 18 months every SI (systems integrator) and ISV (independent software vendor) solution will have Slack as a part of it,” Hasslacher said. “That’s the way the market is going, whether it’s Slack or something like Slack, this is the future of how customers want to and need to engage with technology and also enable that digital-first style of working.”
[RELATED: Salesforce-Owned Slack Grows Partner Program]
On Thursday, Slack and Salesforce named in an online post some partners who have introduced to market industry-focused services that feature Slack.
The partners include Accenture, Atrium, Capgemini, Deloitte, IBM, KPMG, NeuraFlash, PwC, Silverline and Slalom, according to the company. Their industry-focused services are meant to appeal to financial services, manufacturing, communications, retail, media, technology and other verticals.
The announcement came ahead of Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference, which runs from Tuesday to Thursday.
As an example of the industry-focused Slack services, Bozeman, Mont.-based Atrium has a joint Tableau-Slack offering aimed at wealth and asset management firms, where coworkers can share account data and insights using Slack. Tableau is another Salesforce subsidiary, along with integration vendor MuleSoft.
In a recent interview with CRN, Atrium CEO Chris Heineken said that data visualization has been a starting conversation that leads into more sales around predictive analytics, data infrastructure and data strategy.
Heineken praised Salesforce’s partner organization – which now includes Hasslacher and his team of about 20.
“They’ve done a tremendous job supporting the ecosystem,” Heineken said.
Hasslacher said that partners remain an important part of both Slack’s and San Francisco-based front-office software vendor Salesforce’s go-to-market strategy.
“There’s a number of macro-industry trends that are impacting knowledge workers,” Hasslacher said. “Things like … a continuously proliferating set of applications … the ongoing consumerization of IT and what that user experience feels like, the shift from in-office to hybrid and fully distributed. And some companies have formed an opinion. Other companies are still scrambling to figure out what that means for them. And they’re really looking to their consulting and strategy partners to help them understand, internalize the trends that matter to them and their industry.”
Here’s what else Hasslacher had to say to CRN.
Wade Tyler Millward is an associate editor covering cloud computing and the channel partner programs of Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, Salesforce, Citrix and other cloud vendors. He can be reached at wmillward@thechannelcompany.com.
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