Salesforce is not sitting around waiting for their employees to develop things.
Nope. It appears their strategy is to gobble up every company that makes a product that could strengthen their own.
Salesforce has been making a push into the world of social media integration for a while now, and the $326 million acquisition of Radian6 might have just pushed them over the edge. Of course, that all depends on what they do with it.
Salesforce has purchased three companies in the last 4 months: Dimdim, ManyMoon and Heroku.
“With Radian6, Salesforce.com is gaining the technology and market leader in social media monitoring,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce. “We see this as a huge opportunity. Not only will this acquisition accelerate our growth, it will extend the value of all of our offerings.”
What is Radian6? Roughly, they make tools that allow large corporations to effectively join conversations with customers and prospects across the social media landscape. Radian6’s technology captures millions of conversations every day across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs and online communities, and provides real-time information.
Radian6′s clients include AAA, Dell, GE, Kodak, Molson Coors, Pepsico, and UPS.
What does Salesforce plan to do with Radian6? Among many things, Salesforce wants to integrate the new technology into its CRM product. This means Salesforce is about to be a part of Facebook, Twitter and many other social networks.
Social media integration is no stranger to the staffing CRM world. TempWorks integrated Facebook and Twitter into their Enterprise staffing software in June 2010 and customers are raving about it.
Dan Temps CEO Jarrod Daniel says of TempWorks social media integration: ”Dan Temps’ new friends have been transformed into new employees and clients, allowing our company to grow and expand at a time when most competitors are struggling.”
This all leaves us wondering who will Salesforce buy next? Better get your programming on – you too could be the next winner in the Salesforce sweepstakes!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I admire Saleforce and their CEO Marc Benhioff’s book is really good…great reading for any technology sales or marketing person.
Nevertheless, CRM (Salesforce) has an exaggerated stock market cap which makes purchases like Radian possible. Their P/E (price earnings ratio) is something like 250 http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=crm&ql=1 … which makes no sense for a mature company that has difficulty making a profit.
Meanwhile, companies like TempWorks, Success Factors and others are hot on their trail with great enterprise sales and social media platforms.
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These SAAS stocks are in a bubble. When they crash a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money. I hope the government doesn’t jump in to save them.
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