More consolidation news now as Salesforce buys Slack for almost $30bn.

The US cloud computing firm has bought the communications company for $27.7bn, with Reuters reporting that this is the biggest single acquisition that Salesforce has conducted in its 21-year history.

This seems to be part of an on-going battle with Microsoft, who not only is a dominant force in the cloud computing space thanks to its Azure business, but also runs the Teams business communications platform. This became increasingly popular during the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

Slack was launched back in 2013 and became one of the most popular ways of organising work online, including in game development and the industry at large.

It's far from the only solution now, and has struggled to compete with newcomers including Microsoft Teams. Reuters also says that this deal follows Slack failing to capitalise on the COVID-19 pandemic.

In April 2019, Slack went public via a direct listing – meaning it skipped the IPO stage. At the time of writing, the communications platform has a $25.01bn market cap.