Salesforce.com Inc. agreed to buy messaging company Slack Technologies Inc. in a $27.7 billion deal that shows how the biggest players in cloud computing are racing to add muscle amid the pandemic’s remote-work boom.
The cash-and-stock deal, announced Tuesday, is the biggest move yet by Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff, a pioneer in selling subscriptions for software run on remote servers, to turn the company he co-founded 21 years ago into a broad-reaching powerhouse in tech tools for businesses. The deal is almost…