- Mulesoft
Acquisition Date: Mar 20th, 2018
Purchase Price: $6.5B
We hadn’t seen anything like this before in the Salesforce Ecosystem. The Mulesoft acquisition blew all previous acquisitions out of the water in two respects; not only was the purchase price more than double that of the previous front-runner (Demandbase), it marked the new direction Salesforce are heading for.
Mulesoft have an ‘API-led approach to connectivity’, and started off by offering middleware to connect back-office systems. They later expanded to iPaaS (Integration Platform As a Service).
2. Demandware
Acquisition Date: Jun 1, 2016
Purchase Price: $2.8B
Salesforce had mastered the B2B cloud software market, and yet, always had the taste for the B2C market, naturally. Mix in their growing desire to infiltrate front-end operations, and you can see why E-commerce quenched their thirst – the missing piece of the puzzle for B2C customer engagement.
3. ExactTarget
Acquisition Date: Jun 4, 2013
Purchase Price: $2.5B
ExactTarget were a 2000-strong organisation, running 13 years pre-acquisition. The product was the comprehensive, robust foundation Salesforce was seeking as the backbone for their enterprise Marketing suite. In addition, ExactTarget had acquired Pardot 6 months previously – now able to position themselves to both B2B and B2C prospects. It’s funny to read TechCrunch’s observations following the ExactTarget-Pardot announcement: “it puts ExactTarget into a better position against the likes of Salesforce.” (TechCrunch).
4. Krux
Acquisition Date: Oct 3, 2016
Purchase Price: $800M
Programmatic digital advertising was becoming a hot topic in the Spring of 2016, when Forrester predicted that the market will see ‘robust’ growth – an increase of 43% YOY* from 2015-2021 (Forrester). Come October, Salesforce swept up Krux to fill this missing space on the platform. DMPs (Data Management Platforms) are all about using customer data & external sources of interaction data, in order to optimise display adverts – here’s more on what DMPs do.
5. Quip
Acquisition Date: Aug 1, 2016
Purchase Price: $750M
Standalone document processing applications are entirely outdated, but yet, user friendly – a reality that must be acknowledged. Salesforce have always been trying to bridge that gap, 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 organisation.
Collaboration is a key value of Salesforce’s, as it increases user satisfaction and dramatically helps platform adoption.
https://www.salesforceben.com/top-5-salesforce-acquisitions-time-now/
