9 Largest Acquisitions Made By Salesforce plus Evergage

List of acquisitions made by Salesforce

Year	Logo	Company name	Acquisition Date	Purchase price
2003		Tableau	August 2019	$15.7 billion
2006		Mulesoft	May 2018	$6.5 billion
1997		ClickSoftware	August 2019	$1.3 billion
2004		Demandware	July 2016	$2.8 billion
2000		ExactTarget	July 2013	$2.5 billion
2010		Krux	October 2016	$700 million
2012		Quip	August 2016	$750 million
2007		Buddy Media	June 2012	$649 million
2020		Evergage	February 2020	unknown
2000		Pardot	July 2013	$96 million

Evergage: latest acquisition made by Salesforce

Introduction

Evergage is a personalized and customer data platform (CDP) that enables companies to engage on a one-to-one basis across channels. The company was founded by Apptegic in 2010 by Karl Wirth and Greg Hinkle.

Purchase Price and year

Evergage was bought by Salesforce on February 3rd, 2020. The acquisition can prove to be useful for Salesforce marketing and sales companies that require a sense of in-depth Behavioural Data, Machine Learning algorithms, and Predictive Analytics.

Why did Salesforce buy Evergage?

According to a blog post on Salesforce, the acquisition will help companies deliver relevant, data-driven experiences across channels, including web, email, mobile, adtech, social call-center, and more. Salesforce can work with Evergage to boost their AI capabilities across the Salesforce Customer 360 platform.

Salesforce also acquired Rebel in October 2020. Know how both Evergage and Rebel Impact Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Detailing the top acquisitions made by Salesforce

1. Tableau 

• Introduction Tableau is a data visualization software company that was founded in the year 2003 by Christian Chabot, Pat Hanrahan, and Chris Stolte in California. It helps simplify raw data into an understandable format. It speeds up the process of data visualization and analysis with the use of worksheets and dashboards. The data created on the platform can be easily read by a professional at any level in an organization.
• Purchase price and year Tableau was acquired by Salesforce on August 1, 2019. Salesforce had announced plans for acquiring the top-rated business intelligence (BI) vendor on June 10, valued $15.7 billion. “According to geekwire.com, the deal promises to escalate competition between Salesforce and Microsoft, which competes with Tableau through its Power BI data visualization and business intelligence technology.”
• Why did Salesforce acquire Tableau? CRM platforms are responsible for creating massive amounts of sales data and customers end up recruiting data scientists to work on this data. Salesforce Einstein, an automated machine learning-based platform was supposed to predict outcomes based on this data and to recommend insights into what would be the best time to connect to a customer. In order to aid customers with the same more conveniently, Salesforce acquired Tableau. Data analytics was missing from the overall analytics data solutions of Salesforce and Tableau was hired to fit into the role, being the top business intelligence tool in the market.
• How their functioning has been changed after acquisition? According to tableau.com, Tableau puts the customer data of Salesforce to work “by providing analytics for everyone” in the organization. It provides the “entire sales force, channel team, and executives with secure, up-to-date, customized views of data” through all kinds of devices.

Read Also: The Biggest Deal Of The 21st Century: Salesforce Acquires Slack

2. Mulesoft

• About Mulesoft – Mulesoft is an integration software that helps businesses connect data, applications, and devices. It was founded in April 2006 by Ross Mason and Dave Rosenberg with the name Azechi.inc with an aim to provide middleware and messaging and later expanded as an integration Platform as a Service platform. The company changed its name to Mulesoft in 2009.
• Purchase price & year – It was acquired by Salesforce on May 2, 2018, for $6.5 billion, which was announced by the former in March itself. It was reported that the merger was expected to help Salesforce users unite data across different cloud services.
• Why did Salesforce buy Mulesoft –According to Bob Evans, “Salesforce has always made growth and market share top priorities over racking up big profits…” and “ the Mulesoft deal fits perfectly into the company’s profile, strategy, and needs.”
• How their functioning has been changed after acquisition – Within a year of the acquisition, Mulesoft generated $181 million in total revenue during Salesforce’s fiscal fourth quarter. The company also announced a few additional features to help Salesforce and the customers by connecting different systems together and access the Salesforce ecosystem from anywhere they want. They have found new tools to automate the creation of workflows and integrations between systems in a more automated fashion without requiring coding skills.

3. Click software

• Introduction – ClickSoftware is a Field Service Management system that offers automated mobile workforce management and service optimization solutions. It was founded by Moshe BenBassat in 1997.
• Purchase price & year –Salesforce acquired ClickSoftware on August 7, 2019, for $1.3 billion. The deal was aimed at helping Salesforce expand its reach in the fast-growing field service management (FSM) market.
• Why did Salesforce buy Click Software –Regarding the acquisition, Bill Patterson, EVP and GM of Salesforce Service Cloud said in a statement that, “Our acquisition of ClickSoftware will not only accelerate the growth of Service Cloud, but drive further innovation with Field Service Lightning to better meet the needs of our customers.”
• How their functioning has been changed after acquisition –With ClickSoftware, Salesforce aimed at delivering a proactive, intelligent field service. It has proved to be helpful in automatically updating interactions across the Salesforce platform, giving the customers, sales, customer service, and field service complete visibility.

4. Demandware

• Introduction – Demandware is a software technology company founded in 2004 by Stephan Schambach who focused on providing a hosted service that would work at enabling companies to develop and manage easy-to-use, customizable e-commerce websites.
• Purchase price & year –Demandware was acquired by Salesforce in 2016 for $2.8 billion, in order to extend the company’s CRM leadership and to capture the digital commerce market. Salesforce renamed Demandware as Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
• Why did Salesforce buy Demandware –With the growth of e-commerce, Demandware’s retail industry propaganda seemed to be the perfect fit for Salesforce that needed help to meet the demands for retail and consumer product goods. 
• How their functioning has been changed after acquisition – Salesforce Commerce Cloud is one of its most important services. It offers e-commerce as a SaaS solution, frees businesses from the demand of managing a technical roadmap, and provides helps businesses lead the market with its easily manageable features. 

5. ExactTarget

• Introduction – ExactTarget is an on-demand email marketing software solution provider. It was founded in 2000 by Chris Baggott, Pete McCormick, Peter McCormick, and Scott Dorsey. Their on-demand one-to-one marketing applications enabled customers to send business-critical and event-triggered communications to increase sales, optimize marketing investments, and strengthen customer relationships.
• Purchase price & year –It was bought by Salesforce in 2013 for $2.5 billion and renamed as Salesforce Marketing Cloud in 2014. 
• Why did Salesforce buy ExactTarget – ExactTarget was already a Salesforce customer and a Salesforce partner and had a lucrative business model. Its customers include Groupon, Microsoft, Toyota, and CareerBuilders, which made it one of the most preferred choices.
• How their functioning has been changed after acquisition – Salesforce Marketing Cloud combines the CRM and digital marketing data of its customers and in turn simplified data management by building a single view of the customer. This helped the clients gain better visibility into emerging trends, which enabled them to make better decisions, at a faster pace and focus on the results instead of manually putting data together via spreadsheets.

Read Also: Salesforce Signed The Agreement To Acquire Troops.Ai

6. Krux

• Introduction – Krux is a digital management platform founded in 2010 by Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya. It tactfully helps marketers, publishers and agencies drive revenue by delivering personalized commerce, media, and marketing experiences.
• Purchase price & year – Salesforce acquired Krux on 3rd October 2016 for $700 million in a mix of cash and stock. The move was expected to help Salesforce provide its customers with uniquely tailored solutions for its Marketing Cloud platform.
• Why did Salesforce buy Krux –Apart from dealing with the precision of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud audience segmentation and targeting, Krux fed Salesforce Einstein with billions of new signals, enabling companies to deliver more relevant and valuable consumer experiences across every touchpoint.
• How their functioning has been changed after acquisition –Krux was rebranded as Salesforce Digital Management Platform (Salesforce DMP) and later as Audience Studio. It handles vast volumes of data, by ingesting raw data, applying machine learning to allow insights to bubble up, thus eliminating inherent biases that algorithms entail.

7. Quip

• Introduction – Quip is a word processing and productivity software suite that allows groups of people to create and edit documents and spreadsheets as a group, typically for business purposes. It was founded in 2012 by Bret Taylor and Kevin Gibbs.
• Purchase price & year –Salesforce bought Quip on August 1, 2016, for $750 million. The founders in a statement said, “…we’ll be able to extend the Salesforce Customer Success Platform in powerful new ways without next-generation productivity capabilities. The possibilities of mixing data, content, and communication are amazing.”
• Why did Salesforce buy Quip –Salesforce needed a document processing application that would be user-friendly, which would give users the ability to store documents on Salesforce, that would not only make the documents shareable but would also be contextual to their CRM record they’re related to.
• How their functioning has been changed after acquisition – Quip is well-known for their “living Documents” that bi-directionally sync CRM data into documents and spreadsheets, and ‘Live Apps’, for collaboration on calendars, videos, images, and more.

8. Buddymedia

• Introduction –Buddy Media is a social media marketing platform that helps companies build connections and maintain relationships with customers. It was founded by Aryeh Goldsmith, Jeff Ragovin, Kass Lazerow, and Michael Lazerow in 2007.
• Purchase price & year –Salesforce acquired Buddy Media on June 4, 2012, for $649 million with the intent of making Buddy’s marketing tools available to various companies that use Salesforce to manage customer relations from sales to support. 
• Why did Salesforce buy Buddymedia –Bringing a social media tool onto the market was essential for Salesforce as it helped their customers to pump data into their CRMs to use across multiple business functions.
• How their functioning has been changed after acquisition –Buddy Media paired with Radian6 became a Social Studio, that was a part of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and performs at the level where large enterprises need to manage their social channel content, and measure engagement.

Summary

Salesforce has made some of its largest acquisitions in 2019 and 2020 which proves that the brand is transforming into fields that are not just limited to CRM and marketing at a basic level, but is working towards being an automated and technologically upgraded for its vast variety of customers and their different needs. By acquiring companies like Tableau, Clicksoftware, Buddymedia, and such companies, Salesforce is proving to be an ever-expanding company with a large number of services available that help the customers in saving time, and makes their work much more convenient and cost-effective.