Salesforce.com Acquires Cloudconnect

Details are slim, but Salesforce.com (CRM) kicked off Dreamforce week by quietly completing the acquisition of Cloudconnect, a startup founded by former Salesforce.com employee Adam Gross.

Gross worked for Salesforce.com for more than six years as the vice president of Platform and Developer Marketing. After leaving Salesforce.com, he landed at Dropbox, where he was senior vice president of Marketing and Sales for about a year before becoming an investor and adviser of startups for nearly three years.

During that time, Gross co-founded Cloudconnect, a startup focused on helping organizations connect cloud services and their data. Considering the growing Salesforce cloud portfolio, it seems like a good buy for the cloud company.

And there’s already buzz—albeit unconfirmed by any Salesforce.com reps—that the Cloudconnect technology will factor into the new Salesforce 1 PaaS offering.

Here’s what Cloudconnect posted to its website:

“We are delighted to announce that cloudconnect is now part of Heroku, a salesforce.com company.

As part of Heroku, the cloudconnect team will continue to pursue its mission of helping companies create great apps and experiences by connecting their customer data.

Thank you to our customers, colleagues, friends and family – we couldn’t have done it without you, and look forward to your continued support.”

The acquisition fits in with Salesforce.com’s strategy to make it easier for cloud services, particularly its own, to gather information from a variety of databases. That kind of disparate information can be quite tricky to deal with, but Cloudconnect’s technology could go a long way toward making it a simpler and less painful process for Salesforce.com customers and partners.

Rumor has it more details about the acquisition are forthcoming, but for now, we can only speculate on what the Cloudconnect buy will mean for Salesforce.com and its partners. There doesn’t seem to be any cause for concern. In fact, quite the opposite.