Mergers and Acquisitions: Making Salesforce a Solid Tech Ecosystem

What sparked rumors a year ago finally became a reality. Salesforce’s much-talked-about Slack acquisition took place in July 2021 with a whopping $27.7 billion deal. Slack is Salesforce’s biggest acquisition in its historic growth journey, preceded by Servicetrace, which is its latest acquisition and a powerful RPA extension to Mulesoft. A big part of Salesforce’s growth strategy has been its ability to acquire companies and integrate their tech capabilities into its existing tech stack. That’s why over the last two decades, Salesforce has evolved to be a powerhouse in the enterprise software world, empowering companies of all sizes to grow with cloud and AI technologies. Right since its inception in 1999, Salesforce has not only stayed relevant with its offerings but also thrived in its mission to provide customers and stakeholders with newer avenues of success. All fueled by constant innovation. Salesforce has not only disrupted the CRM industry but has also proven that cloud technology has an enormous impact in giving organizations a competitive advantage.

Let’s take a quick look at the timeline of Salesforce’s acquisitions over the years.

Now, let’s take a look at some of the biggest Salesforce acquisitions and how these acquisitions helped them unlock combined potentials:

• • Slack (July 21, 2021) – Slack is a messaging app for businesses that brings people together to share information. It is transforming the way organizations collaborate at work by bringing them over a unified platform. Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack brings Slack-first Customer 360 – a single platform for businesses to connect employees, customers, and partners with one another. Slack’s acquisition has strengthened Salesforce’s market presence even more. With its primary services being related to sales, marketing, and customer service, Salesforce needed a communication tool to help it facilitate seamless communication of employees, customers, and partners. And that is where Slack helped it stand out.

• • Acumen (February 1, 2021) – Acumen is a technology service provider to scale up customer service, digital commerce, sales, and marketing operations for organizations. Salesforce’s acquisition of Acumen enables it to provide businesses, government agencies, and organizations with a suite of powerful solutions that enable them to deliver connected digital experiences and go digital faster.

• • Tableau (August 1, 2019) – Tableau is the world’s leading data analytics platform. It is making data analysis easier for organizations with its built-in visual best practices. The acquisition of Tableau not only added a data visualization component to Salesforce’s tech stack but also gave it access to its large customer base. Tableau positioned Salesforce to help companies drive digital transformation and enable them to make smarter decisions based on deep insights. Tableau empowers Salesforce CRM users with AI-driven analytics and actionable insights, right in their workflow so that they spot trends faster, predict outcomes, and make the right decision every time.

• • MuleSoft (May 2, 2018) – MuleSoft is an integration platform that helps companies connect their business systems including applications, data, devices, and more. Salesforce’s acquisition of MuleSoft gave it wider access to data, something it did not have earlier. MuleSoft brings Salesforce Integration Cloud into action, which enables enterprises to drive intelligent customer experiences over a personalized journey. It also brought more than 1,200 customers to Salesforce, including Coca-Cola, Barclays, Unilever, and Mount Sinai.

• • Demandware (July 11, 2016) – At the time, Demandware was the global cloud leader in the digital commerce market serving brands like Design Within Reach, L’Oreal, and Marks & Spencer, to establish personalized 1:1 connect with customers across the web, mobile, social, and in-store experiences. This became Salesforce Commerce Cloud, extending the company’s CRM leadership and positioning it to capture the digital commerce market.

• • ExactTarget (July 12, 2013) – ExactTarget provides marketing automation and analytics software for email, mobile, social, and online marketing. Salesforce’s acquisition of ExactTarget strengthened its mission of being the world’s leading CRM platform. Their combination helped Salesforce capitalize on ExactTarget’s large and vibrant customer base along with its marketing automation solution. The acquisition helped Salesforce position itself as the ultimate platform to transform the end-to-end customer experience. ExactTarget now operates under the name of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

The Impact of Salesforce’s Acquisitions on its Ecosystem

Every individual acquisition brought different strengths, diversity of talent, and heightened technological capabilities to make Salesforce a gigantic platform. With wide coverage of features, Salesforce enables organizations to make smarter business decisions, deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences, and enable their sales, marketing, and service teams to function in tandem.

Projected Acquisitions of Salesforce

Data will continue to be the ultimate fuel to deliver connected customer experiences and charge up revenues. In its State of Marketing^[i] report, Salesforce highlights that marketers will use 32 data sources by 2022 to power their decisions and growth strategies. So, to introduce an extension to its data visualization capabilities, Salesforce is eyeing to buy a data storytelling vendor, Narrative Science, and roll it into Tableau. Narrative Science offers Lexico that connects to an organization’s data whether stored on-premise or in the cloud. It uses augmented intelligence and machine learning to automatically develop narrative stories using that data. That’s how Salesforce is planning to power up data-driven decision-making and broaden the adoption of analytics.

What Does the Future Hold for Salesforce?

It is undeniable that companies that do not use CRM tools effectively are going to lag behind the competition in this era of connected information. And it has always been one of Salesforce’s key strengths to spot promising players in a relevant field, make investments in them, and finally make a proposition for their acquisition.

So, it is likely that Salesforce will continue to sustain the success it has achieved, amplifying competitive business advantage for organizations. The next big thing that Salesforce is going to unveil is its foray into the healthcare industry and IoT. While the company has already outlined its Health Cloud at Dreamforce this year, it is going to be a key platform that businesses would look up to with the rising demand for an intelligent tool that combines several other capabilities with a feature-rich CRM platform.

Conclusion

By acquiring digital software in different business niches, Salesforce has become a comprehensive customer lifecycle ecosystem. This helps it stay abreast of competition with other tech giants like Microsoft and Adobe and maintain its world’s #1 CRM platform stature. As it continues to acquire prominent digital players, it will keep benefiting businesses with its ever-evolving pool of tools for data management, analytics, customer experience, automation, and artificial intelligence.

Statistics Reference:
^[i] https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/salesforceresearch/viz/7thStateofMarketing/MarketersEmbraceChange_1