Contact: Matt Mullen
Announcing its first acquisition in five months, salesforce.com has reached across the Atlantic for Paris-based startup EntropySoft. The eight-year-old target had raised just $3.5m in a single round of funding. EntropySoft produces perhaps the most complete set of enterprise system connectors in the marketplace. These bits of technology allow the interoperability of data between management platforms, and have found their way into many Web content management, enterprise content management and enterprise search platforms.
While connectors will never be seen as ‘sexy’ technology, they are a fundamental underpinning of many integration strategies for vendors and provide a stable income for those that create and maintain them. So why would salesforce.com, a company that will put up about $3bn in revenue this year, want a stable if unexciting income stream? The truth is that it doesn’t.
What it wants, from our view, is EntropySoft’s technology. Specifically, salesforce.com wants the ability to make greater inroads toward positioning CRM as the single repository for enterprise information. Having the predominant connectivity stack as part of its toolkit makes that process simpler. It allows, for example, much easier exposition of content from legacy systems to the CRM repository and the platform that salesforce.com has built atop it with Force.com and Site.com.
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