As a result of an exodus of executives recently, the software giant has left the company, according to Bloomberg Stewart Butterfield, chief executive officer of Salesforce Inc.'s Slack.
Two other veteran Slack executives will leave, shaking up the division that Salesforce purchased a year ago for more than $27 billion in its largest acquisition.
Butterfield's departure follows the announcement that Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor would leave the company at the end of next month. Butterfield, who was seen as a possible successor to Taylor, will leave the company in January.
Butterfield said in a memo to staff that his departure is unrelated to Taylor's. Planning has been in the works for several months, according to Butterfield. Slack Chief Product Officer Tamar Yehoshua and Senior Vice President Jonathan Prince will leave the company, Butterfield wrote.
A Salesforce spokeswoman said that Butterfield was an amazing leader who created an amazing company in Slack. He has helped lead the successful integration of Slack into Salesforce. The company didn't say anything about the departures of Prince and Yehoshua. Business Insider reported Butterfield's exit earlier in the day.
The spokeswoman said that Lidiane Jones will be replaced by Butterfield as CEO at Slack. Jones was formerly executive vice president of Salesforce's experience cloud, commerce cloud and marketing cloud units, and worked for Sonos Inc. and Microsoft Corp. before joining Salesforce in 2019. The spokesperson said Butterfield was instrumental in choosing her next CEO.
Anurag Rana, a senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, wrote in a note that Butterfield's exit is a risk for the company, given other high-profile executive departures in the past few months. This could cause additional pressure on CEO and founder Marc Benioff to make sure investors that the company still has a strong bench of leaders that can revive organic growth, which has seen steady decline in the past few quarters. It's struggling to improve profit due to the slow growth and increasing pressure from investors. Revenue growth of 8% to 10% in the current period would be the slowest year-over-year increase since Salesforce went public in 2004.
The company has been working to integrate other large acquisitions, like Tableau and Mulesoft, into a cohesive platform of services. In the year 2019 Salesforce bought for $15 billion, Tableau has seen a similar thinning of executive ranks. On Friday, Mark Nelson, the CEO of the unit, announced that he would leave the company, a little over a year after Adam Selipsky, who ran Tableau at the time of Salesforce's purchase, left to lead Amazon.com Inc's cloud-computing division. Jackie Yeaney and Chief Data Officer Wendy Turner-Williams left Tableau Chief Marketing Officer Jackie Yeaney and Chief Data Officer Wendy Turner-Williams in recent months.