Salesforce has decided that Slack is more than a collaboration tool. It is now the entry point for IT Service Management. That shift might feel abrupt, but it is best understood as a continuation of a much longer story. They have actually hovered around the ITSM market for more than a decade, sometimes experimenting at the margins, sometimes engaging directly, and now by making another serious attempt to establish a position.
The first chapter came around 2010, when Salesforce partnered with BMC to create Remedyforce1. It was born in the glow of Force.com, positioned as the alternative to ServiceNow. The idea was elegant. BMC had the ITIL process maps, Salesforce had the platform, and together they could present a credible cloud service desk. For a time it worked. Remedyforce sat inside Salesforce, accessible, familiar, and pitched to CIOs as the seamless way to manage both customer and employee services. But it never broke through.
ServiceNow was already building momentum as a purpose-built ITSM platform. Remedyforce, tied to Salesforce licensing and constrained by Force.com’s data model, became a product that appealed to a subset of customers but lacked gravitational weight. By 2016 Salesforce had stopped selling it, leaving BMC to manage its decline as it pivoted Remedy.
ServiceNow, in contrast, expanded aggressively. What began as incident and change management has since become a launchpad into people, finance, procurement, and governance. But the pattern was clear. ITSM was the wedge. And it became more than a service desk. It became a system of record for how work could be orchestrated across functions. It now comfortably resides across the corporate services2 suite and explains why ServiceNow today is valued not just as a dominant IT tool but as an enterprise platform.
Salesforce never abandoned the original idea. How could it? It just regrouped. The clarity of a competitive corporate services move by ServiceNow has no doubt sparked another response. The Slack acquisition in 2021 simply gave it a new surface, one that was already embedded in the daily rhythm of work for millions of employees.
The strategy this time appears not to build another heavy ITSM suite, but to turn Slack into the surface where ITSM lives. It’s doing this by channeling its service, collaboration, and AI capabilities into Slack, positioning it as the central hub for customer and agent workflows. Incidents, requests, approvals, and knowledge retrieval are all being reimagined as conversations. That is AI speak for “not managed in separate systems”.
While other vendors are exploring the same model, for Salesforce, shifting ITSM into Slack is the defining strategic move. So instead of competing with ServiceNow on service management depth, Salesforce is competing on engagement. ServiceNow positions itself as the suite, Salesforce positions Slack as the surface. The suite governs, the surface engages. It is not yet clear which model will dominate, but the contrast is stark. This may become clearer after Dreamforce 2025.
More broadly, this move also reflects the changing nature of IT buying. The CIO is no longer the sole authority. HR directors, finance controllers, and marketing operations leads have each become a buyer of workflow and automation tools. ServiceNow’s recent market performance is in part due to a more coherent suite that extends from IT outward. Salesforce is addressing the same sprawl by going sideways. If everyone already lives in Slack, why make them step out to another portal3?
There is logic here. The power in ITSM has shifted away from owning the ticketing system to owning the place where people actually pay attention. Shadow IT blurred the lines of control, and now the real battleground is the collaboration layer. Slack is an attention engine. Salesforce is betting that by embedding ITSM into Slack, it can contest the ground where ServiceNow has simply been clearer and earlier to market.
This is where I think the historical echo is important.
Remedyforce failed not because the need was absent, but because the model was wrong for the time. Embedding ITSM in Force.com required CIOs to accept Salesforce as an operational backbone. That leap never happened. It was too early. At that time, few could grasp or commit to the kind of platform-centric architecture that is now becoming standard and will define the next two decades.
But embedding ITSM in Slack doesn’t actually require that leap anyway. Slack is already a fabric of daily collaboration. So it is not a matter of fighting adoption, but of extension. That’s a much easier battle.
The question is whether this will be enough. Suites offer discipline. Surfaces offer immediacy. ServiceNow’s advantage lies in its process depth, its mature CMDB, its ability to enforce governance across sprawling estates.
Salesforce’s advantage lies in presence. Slack is where people already are. AI can potentially accelerate the divergence. Can an agent embedded in Slack resolve a request faster than a ticket logged in a portal? Maybe, but the record of that action still needs to land somewhere. The architecture cannot be surface alone.
I have written a lot over the last 18 months that the future will not be about choosing between systems of record and modern surfaces, but about fusing the two. That’s what Hybrid Platform Architectures are. Where stability at the core meets efficiency at the edge. It means enterprises will not abandon systems of record. Nor will they ignore the efficiency of surfaces. So the real challenge is integration.
If Salesforce can fuse Slack’s immediacy with Service Cloud’s records in a way that feels seamless, it may yet carve a credible path into the “new” ITSM and corporate services suites. If it cannot, ServiceNow’s gravitational pull will continue to hold for now.
With this announcement, at least in the short term, Salesforce is betting that the surface is now more important than the suite. ServiceNow is betting that the suite will always anchor the enterprise. The immediate outcome will be decided by sales speed, execution, and visible impact at the client’s desk.
The market is about to test which of these bets carries the most weight in the long term, and that means the deeper issue is architectural. A surface like Slack can capture attention, but it cannot carry the weight of record. A suite like ServiceNow can govern process, but how will it command presence? What ties process and presence together is the platform beneath them. A platform that unifies engagement and record without forcing them into the same skin.
This is where the real competition lies. It is not really Slack versus ServiceNow. It is whether Salesforce can grow Slack into a surface that rests securely on the trunk of its broader platform architecture.
ServiceNow has already positioned its platform as both root and trunk, a system that promises to govern data, processes, and services in one line. Salesforce has historically excelled in engagement but struggled to convince the enterprise that its architecture is fit to be the backbone. Remedyforce was an early example of that struggle.
The pivot to Slack is an attempt to solve the problem by flipping the argument. They are reversing the traditional approach.
Instead of building from the core outward, they are starting at the surface where users already work and testing whether that can pull the core along. The risk is a disconnected experience if integration falls short, but the opportunity is for Slack to become the unifying layer that finally bridges systems of record with systems of engagement.
Customers are holding back now, but they will not wait forever. Once confidence returns, they’ll place their bets on vendors with stable architectures and disciplined growth. Until then, expect marketing spend to chase quick wins, even if the deals aren’t structurally sound, because in the short term, momentum matters as much as strategy.
Now BMC Helix Remedyforce.
See It’s Time to Rethink Corporate Services, July 2024.
See The Portal Wars Are Back, February 2025.