Contact: Brenon Daly
Built on the back of its two largest acquisitions, salesforce.com on Tuesday unveiled Social.com. The offering, which is part of the salesforce.com Marketing Cloud, connects the company’s core CRM product with advertising on social networks. Doubling down on social ad campaign development and optimization is the latest move by the SaaS giant to step into faster-growing markets.
At the heart of the company’s Marketing Cloud business are the ad placement and publishing technology that salesforce.com picked up with Buddy Media last June and the social listening products from Radian6 that it acquired two years ago. Collectively, those purchases cost salesforce.com a cool $1bn.
While salesforce.com has announced a handful of acquisitions since Buddy Media, those deals have been small technology purchases, notably around collaboration. However, recently a number of signs have pointed to (perhaps) larger M&A aspirations. Last month, salesforce.com sold $1bn in debt, which could be used to go shopping. Additionally, the company is currently hiring for at least two positions in its corporate development office.
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