"Salesforce to Acquire Slack for $27.7 Billion" article.

need a response to:

#1 What is meant by the term "vertical integration"? Describe the vertical integration of Salesforce by purchases Slack.

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The term vertical integration refers to a strategy where a firm owns or takes over many of the production steps in the supply or value chain. The firm can integrate upstream and downstream in the vertical chain, beginning with raw materials, such as wood, metal, etc., and ending with the finished products, such as furniture, automobiles, etc. Vertical integration benefits firms by allowing them to control processes, reduce costs, and improve their efficiencies (Besanko et al., 2017).

Salesforce has been vertically integrating its organization over the last couple of years with the purchases of Tableau, a data analytics provider, and most recently, Vlocity, a mobile software provider. Salesforce, a marketing and sales software company that provides CRM software, plans to acquire Slack, a business communication/collaboration platform provider, by integrating downstream. Both services each company offers are complementary to each other. Salesforce will integrate Slack's software into their new interface for Sales-force Customer 360 (Griffith & Hirsch, 2021).