Salesforce announced on Tuesday that it would acquire Slack for a fee worth US$27.7 billion in cash and stock. With the acquisition, Slack will then be integrated deeply into all of Salesforce Cloud.

By the end of the transaction, Slack will then be an operating unit of Salesforce while the Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield will continue to lead the platform.

“Stewart and his team have built one of the most beloved platforms in enterprise software history, with an incredible ecosystem around it,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in the statement. “Together, Salesforce and Slack will shape the future of enterprise software and transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world.”

Slack’s relevance grew exponentially during the lockdown especially when businesses needed to operate online as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The platform had continued to add up new features such as push-to-talk audio calls, Instagram-like stories and even the ability for people from different companies to send direct messages to users.

“Salesforce and Slack will give companies a single source of truth for their business and a unified platform for connecting employees, customers and partners with each other and the apps they use every day, all within their existing workflows,” the companies said.

The deal is expected to close by the second quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2022 while awaiting total approval from Slack stockholders, regulatory approvals and other agreements. The shares of Slack however jumped by nearly 30% following the reports of the acquisition last week.