Why so many acquisitions?
Salesforce is a very dynamic CRM platform always wanting to innovate. Their development lab always releases novel social and mobile tools. Recently, we also witnessed Salesforce shifting its focus to Internet of Things (IoT) and majorly Artificial Intelligence (AI). At Dreamforce, we saw Salesforce panning out most of the sessions and its growth plans around AI. The launch of Salesforce Einstein evidently describes the growing interest of Salesforce in AI. Salesforce claims Einstein to be everyone’s data scientist. Moreover, 6 out of the 9 companies acquired by Salesforce are AI companies. Demandware is a prominent exception to this since it was acquired by Salesforce to launch a new commerce-cloud section in Salesforce. While Demandware was acquired for a handsome sum of $2.8 billion, Quip and Krux followed the first with $750 million and $800 million respectively. Read more here.
How the procurements sync with Salesforce’s business strategy?
There were many previous acquisitions that didn’t contribute much towards the growth of Salesforce. Benioff strongly believes that innovation may come not only from himself, but from someone other than him within the company. Salesforce always looks for innovation that helps the company grow. This, very well justifies Salesforce’s acquisition strategy. While some acquisitions help in opening up entirely new product segments (eg: Demandware), firms like BeyondCore pushes more growth in existing segments. Firms like Krux, MetaMind etc. were acquired by Salesforce with a vision to boost the Salesforce Einstein platform.
We will take a bird’s eye view of who all were acquired by Salesforce in 2016 and what they are into.
| Company Name | What they Do? |
| Demandware | An on-demand e-commerce platform for retailers. This has been integrated into Salesforce Commerce Cloud. |
| Quip | A cloud-based word processing app and document collaboration services provider |
| BeyondCore | A Business Intelligence and enterprise data analytics firm. Salesforce aims at integrating data analytics with cloud components |
| Krux | AI software enables marketers and media companies to analyze customer data and behavior and deliver unique customer experiences |
| HeyWire | Connects mobile clients through text messages |
| Coolan | AI start-up with key focus on data-center predictive analytics, allows you to collect and analyze hardware data. |
| MetaMind | Offers AI capabilities for sales, service and marketing. MetaMind is now part of Salesforce Einstein. |
| PredictionIO | Open Source Machine Learning server that even helps data scientists |
| Implisit | A data automation start-up that that will augment data analysis and predictions |
