Salesforce Acquisitions
Salesforce have been pretty busy of late with expanding their portfolio of acquisitions. With two acquisition just this month; CloudCraze (CloudCraze is a leading B2B commerce platform built natively on Salesforce) and Mulesoft (MuleSoft provides one of the world’s leading platforms for building application networks that connect enterprise apps, data and devices, across any cloud and on-premise), making three in total just this year!
The following is a list of acquisitions by Salesforce:
- Sendia (April 2006) – now Salesforce Classic
- Kieden (August 2006) – now Salesforce for Google AdWords
- Kenlet (January 2007) – original product CrispyNews used at Salesforce IdeaExchange and Dell IdeaStorm – now relaunched as Salesforce Ideas
- Koral (March 2007) – now Salesforce Content
- Instranet (August 2008) for $31.5 million – now re-branded to Salesforce Knowledge
- GroupSwim (December 2009) – now part of Salesforce Chatter
- Informavores (December 2009) – now re-branded to Visual Workflow
- Jigsaw Data Corp. (April 2010)– now known as Data.com
- Sitemasher (June 2010) – now known as Site.com
- Navajo Security (August 2011)
- Activa Live Chat (September 2010) – now known as Salesforce Live Agent
- Heroku (December 2010)
- Etacts (December 2010)
- Dimdim (January 2011)
- Manymoon (February 2011) – now known as Do.com
- Radian6 (March 2011) for $340M
- Model Metrics (November 2011)
- Rypple (December 2011) – now known as Work.com
- Stypi (May 2012)
- Buddy Media (May 2012) for US$689 million
- ChoicePass (June 2012)
- Thinkfuse (June 2012)
- BlueTail (July 2012) – now part of Data.com
- GoInstant (July 2012) for US$70 million
- Prior Knowledge (December 2012)
- EntropySoft (February 2013) for an undisclosed sum – now known as Salesforce Files Connect
- clipboard.com (May 2013) for US$12 million
- ExactTarget (announced June 4, 2013) – now Marketing Cloud for US$2.5 billion
- EdgeSpring (June 7, 2013) – now part of the Analytics Cloud
- RelateIQ (July 10, 2014) for US$390 million – now known as SalesforceIQ
- Toopher (April 1, 2015)
- Tempo (app) (May 29, 2015) – now part of SalesforceIQ
- ÄKTA (September 2015) – for an undisclosed sum.
- MinHash (December 2015)
- SteelBrick (December 2015) for US$360 million
- PredictionIO (February 2016)
- Implisit (May 2016)
- Demandware (July 2016)
- Coolan (July 2016)
- Quip (August 2016) for US$750 million
- BeyondCore (August 2016)
- Gravitytank (Sep 2016)
- Krux (Oct 2016)
- Sequence (February 2017)
- Attic Labs (January 2018)
- CloudCraze (March 2018)
- MuleSoft (March 2018)
What is an Acquisition?
An acquisition is where a company buys most, if not all, of another firm’s ownership stakes to assume control of it. An acquisition occurs when a buying company obtains more than 50% ownership in a target company. The acquiring company will often purchase the other company’s stock and other assets, which allows the acquiring company to make decisions regarding the newly acquired assets. Acquisitions can be paid for in cash, in the acquiring company’s stock or a combination of both.
6 Notable Tech Acquisitions
- Dell bought data-storage company EMC for $67 billion in 2016, making it the biggest tech deal till this date.
- In 2016 for a cash-and-stock-deal worth $37 billion, Avago acquired the rival chip-maker Broadcom. Broadcom’s chips are used widely in smartphones made by tech giants like Apple and Samsung Electronics.
- Microsoft acquired professional networking website LinkedIn in a transaction valued at $26.2 billion in July 2016.
- Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $22 billion in 2014. The company announced the acquisition for $19 billion in February 2014, however, by the time the deal closed in October 2016 its value went up to $22 billion due to increase in WhatsApp’s stock price.
- In February 2017, Ford Motor Co. acquired majority ownership of Argo AI, an artificial-intelligence startup for a reported $1 billion.
- On March 7, 2017, Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced they are to buy Nimble Storage for approx $1.09 billion cash. The acquisition became final on April 5, 2017
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