Salesforce made A LOT of moves in 2016. As a company with 19,000 plus employees and a valuation around 49 Million, you wouldn’t expect less. A big part of 2016 for Salesforce was acquisitions. Let’s take a look at 10 companies that Salesforce bought out and breakdown what they do.
February 2016
PredictionIO
PredictionIO is an open source machine learning server. It lets you quickly build and deploy web service engines, respond to dynamic queries in real time, unify data from multiple platforms in batch or in real time for comprehensive predictive analytics, and more.
Key word: machine learning
Salesforce unveiled Einstein in late 2016 so a move like this makes sense.
April 2016
MetaMind
MetaMind was a machine learning startup that was backed by none other than Marc Benioff. When MetaMind was started in 2014 it made a buzz with its image recognition capabilities that outperformed other companies in the same space. 2 years later and MetaMind has officially become part of Einstein.
Key word (Again): Machine Learning
Its no surprise here that Salesforce is swallowing up any company that proves its worth in the machine learning market. Especially one that was originally backed by Benioff in the first place.
May 2016
Implisit
Implisit, which was an Israeli startup, leverages predictive analytics to boost sales organizations’ performance and revenue. … Implisit’s technology captures and analyzes prospect and client communication, automatically matches it with CRM records to provide clear, updated and actionable insights
Key word: Predictive Analytics
This goes hand in hand with the big push toward machine learning. Salesforce is trying to make Einstein learn to do the work on its own, and anything with the word predictive in it seems enticing.
June 2016
Demandware
Everyone should be aware of this one. The 2.8 billion acquisition brought in the global cloud leader in digital commerce marketing. Salesforce quickly took the service and turned it into their new commerce cloud. Read the official announcement about the purchase here
Keyword: 2.8 Billion
Salesforce is growing and this was a HUGE move. Demandware was a huge piece in their ecosystem and now it belongs to Salesforce.
July 2016
Coolan
Coolan, a small boutique sized startup, is bringing crowdsourced, predictive analytics to the data center. Using automated, real-time information aggregated from the data center environments of a community of operators, Coolan’s platform leverages machine learning to provide peer benchmarking and historical data that predicts failure trends, prevents outages, and informs purchasing decisions.
Key word: Data Center
This startup was small but had a big impression, they really know what they are doing when it comes to the nitty gritty of monitoring the components in data centers.
August 2016
Quip
This one is a bit more lowkey, but nonetheless it was an interesting pickup. Quip is a living document platform that combines docs, spreadsheets, and communication all in one to help teams get work done faster and smarter. Enabling a frictionless workflow for creating and iterating on living documents, Quip was built for the way people work today — across a variety of devices and locations.
Key word: Low Key
Not every acquisition has to make a big splash. Small moves that might grow into something later are smart moves also. Quip is going to revolutionize productivity so Salesforce grabbed them to make it happen under their flagship.
August 2016
BeyondCore
BeyondCore, a 110 million purchase, provides SaaS data analytics software that puts the power of insightful, accurate, intuitive and actionable analytics in the hands of every business user. Its leading-edge Smart Data Discovery technology gives users a full range of descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive bias-free analytics. Beyondcore has basically become Salesforces’ wave analytics platform.
Key Word: Analytics
Wave analytics is another huge push salesforce has made recently. Wave is pushing the boundaries the boundaries of business intelligence.
September 2016
HeyWire
Now called Salesforce LiveMessage, HeyWire was the first mobile messaging cloud provider launching 6 years ago, and now they are reinvigorating a new communications channel for Salesforce. Read the announcement about it here
Key word: First
Salesforce has always been innovative, and pulling it companies that break the limits is something they seem to like doing.
October 2016
Krux
Krux, a data management platform, was bought to help extend the tools of the salesforce marketing cloud. An interesting note about this one is directly from Kruxes release statement
“Krux will extend the Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s audience segmentation and targeting capabilities to power consumer marketing with even more precision, at scale. In addition, Krux will feed Salesforce Einstein with billions of new signals, enabling companies to be even smarter about their customers. Krux and Salesforce together will empower every company to deliver more relevant and valuable consumer experiences across every touchpoint.”
Key word: See bolded text, I think you know where this one is going.
December 2016
Twin Prime
Salesforce rounded off the year with their final acquisition in startup Twin Prime, company that aims to help improve the mobile app experience. When the company was purchased, it was valued around 25 million, so it wasn’t a huge buy, but significant either way. The company claimed to increase app usage by 50%.
Key word: Mobile
In my speculation, acquiring Twin Prime may be a signal that Salesforce is planning on investing more into their mobile app, or improving on mobile apps that they are associated with, who knows?
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