Tag: GroupSwim

More than just Chatter at salesforce.com

Ben Kolada

Contact: Ben Kolada, Kathleen Reidy

Fresh from closing its $249m acquisition of Ruby developer Heroku, salesforce.com recently announced, and closed, its purchase of Web-conferencing startup Dimdim for $31m. The Lowell, Massachusetts-based target provided a cloud-based open source Web-conferencing service for businesses, and with this deal salesforce.com now claims 60,000 Chatter users, though with its ‘freemium’ model we suspect that only a fraction of these are paying customers.

Salesforce.com paid $31m in cash for Dimdim, which had raised a total of $8.4m from venture investors Draper Richards, Index Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. Per salesforce.com’s conference call, Dimdim has 75 employees spread throughout its offices in Lowell and Hyderabad, India. Although the target’s annual revenue wasn’t disclosed, we estimate that it closed 2010 with about $2m in revenue.

Like salesforce.com’s previous collaboration pickup – GroupSwim, in December 2009 – Dimdim’s services will be shut down, and its capabilities will be rolled into Chatter, salesforce.com’s social collaboration software service that first launched in 2009. As my colleague Kathleen Reidy notes (click here to see her full report on the acquisition), as evidenced by the almost immediate shutdown of the Dimdim service, salesforce.com isn’t interested in the pure Web-conferencing market. Salesforce.com will honor contracts with Dimdim’s existing customers, though these will not be eligible for renewal, and it has terminated Dimdim’s free service. Dimdim also had an open source distribution and while this is still available, it won’t see any further updates. Instead, Dimdim will provide features to Chatter, which is also incorporating semantic analysis technology from GroupSwim.

salesforce.com goes for a GroupSwim

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly, China Martens

Almost two months ago, we noted that several sources had indicated that salesforce.com may have reached outside its own walls for a little help in getting its Chatter product out the door. (Salesforce.com showed off Chatter, an enterprise collaboration product, at its Dreamforce conference in November, although it is not yet available.) The official company line at the time was that Chatter was developed in-house, which is consistent for acquisition-averse salesforce.com. The vendor has done just six deals – all of them tiny – in the decade that it has been in business.

In recent days, it has surfaced that salesforce.com did indeed acquire a startup. A visit to the homepage of GroupSwim indicates that the company ‘is now part of salesforce.com.’ We have followed GroupSwim since mid-2008, with my colleague Kathleen Reidy initially writing that the startup’s pairing of semantic analysis with content sharing/collaboration appeared to be a promising approach in a rather crowded market. When we last visited with GroupSwim a year ago, the 15-employee firm claimed 30 customers. It was still living off angel money.

In contrast to the rather meager financial situation at GroupSwim, salesforce.com is closing in on an all-time price for its shares. (Current market capitalization: $8.6bn, which works out to a triple-digit P/E ratio on a trailing basis.) And the on-demand giant just priced $500m in a convertible note offering that will bring its total holdings of cash and marketable securities to $1.5bn. With such a rich treasury, salesforce.com could likely buy hundreds more startups like GroupSwim. Or maybe it’s thinking of something bigger?