Contact: Brian Satterfield
As more customers flock to social networks to deliver their feedback, Microsoft follows on the heels of several of its CRM rivals by buying its way into the social media monitoring software sector. The software giant, which established itself in the CRM market a decade ago with two significant acquisitions, has reached for 14-year-old Swiss software provider Netbreeze.
Announced in conjunction with Microsoft’s Dynamics Convergence 2013 conference, Netbreeze adds social media monitoring and text analytic features to the company’s CRM offering. A blog post on the Microsoft Dynamics website indicated that Netbreeze’s native support for 28 different languages was a key driver in the transaction.
Microsoft made inroads into adding social functionality to Dynamics with last September’s $1.2bn acquisition of enterprise social networking software firm Yammer. The company’s moves come after two of its major CRM competitors had already been active in the social media monitoring sector.
Salesforce.com’s activity in social software dates back to 2009 and includes the $326m purchase of Radian6, still the largest deal we’ve seen in the space. Meanwhile, Oracle followed suit last summer when it picked up both Netbreeze’s US-based rival Collective Intellect and similar social marketing automation software vendor Involver.