10 Salesforce Acquisitions in 2016

With the news that Salesforce could be an interested party in Twitter, Talkin’ Cloud takes a look back at 10 acquisitions Salesforce has made in 2016. The acquisitions touch on many aspects of Salesforce’s business, including its Marketing and Service Clouds, and are part of a $4 billion investment the company has made this year to grow through acquisitions.

For more details about Salesforce’s acquisitions, including purchase prices, check out Crunchbase.

Salesforce kicked off Dreamforce 2016 with the news that it acquired Krux, a data management platform. The acquisition will help extend the Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s audience segmentation and targeting capabilities. According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal is reportedly worth $700 million.

  2. HeyWire, September 2016

Salesforce acquired HeyWire, a mobile messaging platform, to bring full integrated mobile messaging capabilities to the Salesforce Service Cloud.

Salesforce quietly acquired Gravitytank at the end of September, just ahead of Dreamforce. The consulting company, with offices in Chicago and San Francisco, offers services around business strategy, experience design, and product development.

Smart data discovery vendor BeyondCore joined Salesforce via acquisition last month, joining its Analytics Cloud division. BeyondCore will extend smart data discovery and advanced analytics capabilities across the entire Salesforce Customer Success Platform as well, according to the companies.

Salesforce acquired Quip in August, and has already integrated some products based on the acquisition. Quip provides word processing tools in the cloud, competing with Microsoft and Google.​

Salesforce acquired data center management software startup Coolan, planning to use its technology to optimize its infrastructure.

Salesforce acquired e-commerce platform Demandware in June, and last month introduced a product based on the acquisition – called Commerce Cloud. It taps existing options of Demandware’s software to manage e-commerce with extra features including AI.​

Salesforce acquired Implisit, an Israeli data-intelligence startup, with the plan that it would integrate Implisit’s technology into its own services. Implisit stopped providing services to its customers in July, but paying customers were invited to participate in the pilot program for future Salesforce product based on Implisit’s technology.

MetaMind, acquired by Salesforce in Q2 2016, is now part of Salesforce Einstein to help “power the world’s smartest CRM by embedding state-of-the-art deep learning technology into the Salesforce Platform.

Prediction IO was Salesforce’s first acquisition of 2016. The open source machine learning platform was donated to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) in July 2016. According to PredictionIO founder, Simon Chan, this will allow the community “to use Salesforce PredictionIO’s innovative platform to build and deploy predictive, intelligent apps at scale.”