Salesforce’s Acquisitions in 2019: What’s the CRM Behemoth up to?

From a small apartment on Telegraph Hill to the gigantic Salesforce Tower—the tallest building in San Francisco—we all have witnessed the growth story of Salesforce for the past two decades.

It all started with Marc Benioff leaving Oracle to pursue the idea of Salesforce. Apart from Marc, the ones who turned the idea of Salesforce into reality were Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez. The idea of cloud-based CRMs and Software-as-a-Service revolutionized the market. The changes, however, weren’t easy to adapt to. Salesforce was the change that redefined the business market.

Salesforce didn’t do it all alone, there were some exceptional decisions that contributed to its growth. The CRM giant began its caravan of acquiring companies to boost its business operations in 2006 with its very first acquisition of Sendia (now Salesforce Classic). The business kept growing and so did the number of companies added to Salesforce’s belt.

Salesforce has completed 60 acquisitions till date, with the recent acquisition of ClickSoftware and Tableau–one of the biggest bets by Salesforce for $15.7b.

In terms of acquisitions, 2016 was the best year for Salesforce with nine acquisitions including Demandware, Krux, and Quip.

We all have seen how these acquisitions helped Salesforce become a multi-billion dollar company and number one in the CRM industry. But the CRM behemoth is not willing to stop anytime soon as it’s eyeing to achieve more.

In this blog post, we will discuss the implications of Salesforce’s acquisitions in 2019 and what to expect from Dreamforce 2019, the most exciting Dreamforce event ever.

Many argue that one of the intentions behind all these acquisitions, apart from using the tools to strengthen the capabilities of Salesforce, was gathering data. This is still a debatable topic. What’s your take on this, let us know in the comments section.

Salesforce aims at becoming a $60 billion company by 2034. Pretty aggressive, we all can agree to it. Salesforce, however, sees its revenue goals like chapters in a book. As we are in the middle of 2019, the company is into Chapter 3, the $20-billion goal to be fulfilled by 2022. Beyond that, Chapters 4 and 5 loom with the goal of adding $20 billion every six years.

That, however, doesn’t mean that the goal can’t be achieved. Salesforce has to be aggressively acquisitive just like it was in 2016 and maintain its steady record of growth for the next 15 years.

And what we’ve witnessed so far in 2019, Salesforce is trying to do exactly the same. We’ve already covered nine months in 2019 and Salesforce has completed five major acquisitions to date (six if we include Salesforce Foundation). Salesforce is paving its way to meet its revenue goals. Following are the acquisitions completed by Salesforce in 2019 so far:

1. Griddable
2. MapAnything
3. Bonobo AI
4. Tableau
5. Click Software

Let’s get you through what each one of them brings to the table for Salesforce:

1. Griddable

Griddable came as the first acquisition by Salesforce in 2019. The company has the distinction of making the first smart grid for enterprise data. The announcement of Griddable was made on 30th January 2019. Griddable empowered Salesforce to provide its users with a seamless platform to synchronize enterprise data in the cloud.

2. MapAnything

Salesforce’s acquisition of MapAnything will help Salesforce extend the power of two of its premier products—Sales and Service Cloud. These two products contributed to one-third of Salesforce’s revenue and the inclusion of MapAnything will empower both the clouds to deliver market-leading location-based intelligence solutions. Thereby, improving field sales and service employee’s productivity and deliver customer success.

3. Bonobo AI

Bonobo helps companies analyze customer interactions, empowering sales teams to spot trends, improve conversations, and drive customer success. The addition of Bonobo will enhance the power of Salesforce Sales Cloud by leveraging conversational intelligence within the Salesforce Platform, allowing companies to utilize one of their most valuable sources of data – customer interaction.

4. Tableau

It’s been the biggest ever bid for Salesforce. Salesforce acquired Tableau for a whopping sum of $15.7 billion, which is 13.5x Tableau’s 2018 revenue—$1.16 billion.

Most people indicated that Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau was intended to strengthen its AI-powered analytics tool – Einstein, but there’s more to that. Using Tableau, Salesforce can deepen its integrated analytics stack in its own cloud, by providing customers a single place to analyze everything without the need for hopping to other clouds.

For a detailed analysis of Salesforce’s Tableau acquisition, read here.

5. ClickSoftware

ClickSoftware was working in partnership with Salesforce for three years now. Salesforce’s very own field marketing tool was also developed in partnership with ClickSoftware. So, it came as no surprise that Salesforce announced to acquire ClickSoftware.

This acquisition has major implications for Salesforce. One of them is that it will strengthen its premier product – Service Cloud with field service capabilities. For details, read our blog post on the implications of Salesforce’s acquisition of ClickSoftware.

Conclusion

Everyone who is familiar with Salesforce is aware that you can’t predict Salesforce’s next move. Considering some of the key acquisitions this year, the CRM giant is building an atmosphere of anticipation around its biggest event of the year – Dreamforce 2019.

The tagline of Dreamforce this year is “Join us as the future takes center stage.” and the theme says “prepare yourself for the unexpected.”

With Dreamforce less than a month away, Salesforce has set the stage for something grand. The excitement can already be felt in the air. No one can predict what Salesforce will announce at Dreamforce, but it’s going to be crucial for Salesforce’s goal of doubling the revenue by 2022. What comes out of Dreamforce ‘19, that remains to be seen.

Would You be Coming to Dreamforce This Year?