Salesforce is growing at an incredibly rapid rate. However, many aren’t aware that Salesforce has been consistently making a number of acquisitions for years across the various range. New to the Salesforce! Before you go through this blog: - https://sfdcblog.binaryrepublik.com/2020/11/achieve-business-productivity-using.html#.YA7UUOgzbIU
Salesforce Tower- the tallest building in SAN Francisco, the journey from the small apartment to the gigantic tower, we all have witnessed the growth story of Salesforce for the past decades.
Salesforce didn’t do it all alone. There were some unusual decisions that contributed to escalating graph of Salesforce. The CRM giant began to boost its operations and acquiring companies in 2006 with its very first acquisition of Sendia (now Salesforce Classic). Then the business keeps growing and so did the number of companies add to Salesforce belt.
Salesforce acquisitions till date - 66
Number of Investments – 38
Total Funding Amount - $65.4M
While Salesforce acquired 4 companies in 2020, the CRM giant has also entered an agreement to acquire Slack for $27.7b- it’s largest acquisition ever.
In terms of acquisition, 2016 was best year for Salesforce with 9 acquisitions including Demandware, Krux and Quip.
Today’s post covers the top acquisitions by price. Now it’s time to consider on why these former companies justified their purchase price and how they incorporate with Salesforce products.
1.Slack:
Acquisition Date: Dec 1st, 2020
Purchase Price: $27.7B
One-line Pitch: The Salesforce and Slack integration allows you to search your Salesforce instance from Slack, and share results in Slack. The integration also allows you to share messages both ways between Salesforce Chatter and your Slack channel(s).
Why Salesforce bought Slack?
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says the Slack Connect digital communications application will integrate with the Salesforce suite of cloud-based ecommerce, marketing, sales, service and analytics software to help companies better serve their customers. 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 gives Salesforce a missing communication layer on top of its other products, something especially important when interactions with customers, partners or fellow employees have become mostly digital.
2.Tableau:
Acquisition Date: Jun 10th, 2019
Purchase Price: $15.7B
One-line Pitch: Tableau can help you fully leverage your rich customer data by providing analytics for everyone in your organization. Use Tableau to blend Salesforce data from across the Customer 360 platform with your other business data for increased visibility and a deeper understanding of your customers.
Why Salesforce bought Tableau?
There are two key takeaways from this acquisition from Salesforce perspective –
✔✔Data analytics is going to be the core of its offering going forward.
✔✔Data visualization as a technology stack was a key layer missing in its overall analytics play.
Einstein and Tableau together will deliver the most intelligent and intuitive analytics and visualization platform for every department and every user at any company. Tableau's capabilities around desktop publishing and embedding BI directly into consumer-facing apps can augment Einstein Analytics to make self-service analytics a reality.
Tableau acquisition also fits well with Salesforce’s cloud ambitions that kick-started in 2014 with Salesforce Wave Analytics, also known as Analytics Cloud.
3.MuleSoft:
Acquisition Date: Mar 20th, 2018
Purchase Price: $6.5B
One-line Pitch: MuleSoft and Salesforce give companies the ability to unlock data across systems, develop scalable integration framework, and ultimately create differentiated, connected experiences at a rapid pace.
Why Salesforce bought MuleSoft?
MuleSoft made a number of announcements designed to simplify process and put it in the hands of more customers. For starters, it’s announcing Accelerators, which are pre-defined integrations that let companies connect more easily to other systems. Not surprisingly, two of the first ones connect data from external products and services to Salesforce Service Cloud and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
This partnership between Salesforce and MuleSoft will create what’s been called an “Integration Cloud.” The Integration Cloud, has all the SF tools that enable users to customize their experience. It will have SF’s Einstein (AI), Lightning for workflow management, an Integration Builder, and Integration Experiences. All these things will be based on MuleSoft’s powerful hybrid platform.
4.Demandware:
Acquisition Date: Jun 1, 2016
Purchase Price: $2.8B
One-line Pitch: Demandware will ultimately serve as the company's Commerce Cloud. Demandware and Salesforce have a series of joint customers and the latter needed to enable more e-commerce along with its customer relationship management tools.
Why Salesforce bought Demandware?
Demandware produces software technology specifically for B2C retail e-commerce. This move also furthers the company is making from serving professionals who serve customers to serving those customers directly as, in this case, they shop online. Retailers were never fixated over CRM, but Salesforce spotted the future need for 1-to-1 shopping experiences. Demandware had capitalized on a data-driven world with high consumer expectations.
5.ExactTarget:
Acquisition Date: Jun 4, 2013
Purchase Price: $2.5B
One-line Pitch: ExactTarget provides marketing automation and analytics software for email, mobile, social and online marketing. The solution also offers consulting and implementation services.
Why Salesforce bought ExactTarget?
Salesforce was seeking as the backbone for their enterprise Marketing suite. Salesforce created a world-class marketing platform across email, social, mobile and the web. ExactTarget’s large and vibrant customer base—including many of the world’s largest consumer brands— had access to new world-class social marketing capabilities, and able to leverage salesforce leading sales, service and platform solutions to transform their end-to-end customer experience.
6.ClickSoftware:
Acquisition Date: Aug 7th, 2019
Purchase Price: $1.35B
One-line Pitch: Offers automated mobile workforce management and service optimization solutions for enterprise and small businesses, both for mobile and in-house resources.
Why Salesforce bought Click Software?
ClickSoftware, an acknowledged leader in Field Service Management (FSM) solutions. The addition of ClickSoftware will enhance Salesforce Service Cloud’s leadership as the #1 service platform, empowering every service employee from the contact center to the field to deliver more connected, intelligent customer service.
ClickSoftware enables companies to intelligently schedule and optimize field service work. Salesforce Field Service Lightning, built on Service Cloud, harnesses the latest in dispatching, mobile workforce empowerment and IoT technologies to empower companies to connect their entire service workforce on a single, centralized platform. With the combined capabilities of Field Service Lightning and ClickSoftware, Salesforce will be positioned to lead the way to the future of field service.
7.Vlocity:
Acquisition Date: Feb 25th, 2020
Purchase Price: $1.33B
One-line Pitch: Vlocity provides Industry specific solutions based on the processes that organizations in certain industries have. These come pre-built, which saves organizations a lot of money on customization costs and can be configured, low-code!
Why Salesforce bought Vlocity?
Vlocity is one of the largest and fastest-growing Salesforce-native ISVs. Many Customers are accelerating their plans for a digital-first, work-from-anywhere environment. With this exciting new chapter with Salesforce Customer 360 and Vlocity, Customers will be able to benefit from the most advanced industries platform for digital transformation, as well as tools and expert guidance completely tailored to their specific needs.
8.Quip:
Acquisition Date: Aug 1, 2016
Purchase Price: $750M
One-line Pitch: Quip is a living document platform that combines docs, spreadsheets, and communication to help teams get work done faster and smarter.
Why Salesforce bought Quip?
The app allows users to create and edit documents online with a real-time commenting system. By giving users the ability to store documents on Salesforce, not only making documents shareable, but contextual to whichever CRM record they’re related to. However, as we know, this often creates more friction and confusion. Unfortunately, features such as Notes & Attachments, CRM content and Libraries had surpassed their prime for the modern organization.
9.Krux:
Acquisition Date: Oct 3, 2016
Purchase Price: $700M
One-line Pitch: Krux helps marketers, publishers and agencies drive revenue by delivering smarter content, commerce and marketing experiences.
Why Salesforce bought Krux?
Krux was rapidly rebranded as Salesforce DMP, and incorporated into the Marketing Cloud. The purchase means that Salesforce will be able to better compete with the DMPs at its major marketing cloud competitors, such as Oracle and Adobe, and brings into the company the data needed for large-scale audience segmentation and targeting for ads. This also plays into the bigger intelligence piece that the company has been trying to build by way of its new Einstein machine learning platform.
10.MapAnything:
Acquisition Date: Apr 17th, 2019
Purchase Price: $213M
One-line Pitch: MapAnything helps companies build location-based workflows, something that could come in handy for sales or service calls.
Why Salesforce bought MapAnything?
Salesforce’s acquisition of MapAnything will help Salesforce extend the power of two of its premier products—Sales and Service Cloud. These two products contributed to one-third of Salesforce’s revenue and the inclusion of MapAnything will empower both the clouds to deliver market-leading location-based intelligence solutions. Thereby, improving field sales and service employee’s productivity and deliver customer success.
MapAnything’s platform offers a routing and scheduling engine, integrated GPS tracking capabilities, and a location-based workflow layer that helps answer “complex spatial questions” and drive prompter customer service.
Salesforce has made some of its largest acquisition till date which proves that the brand is transforming into fields that are not just limited to CRM and marketing at basic level, but Is working towards being an automated and technologically advanced for its vast variety of customers and their different needs.
What are your views on Salesforce Acquisition’s till date? Which of them is more useful or productive for your industry? Let me know your views in comment session.
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