Salesforce.com Continues Their Canadian Acquisition Spree with Rypple Inc.

By: Kuljit Grewal  |   July 24th, 2012   |   Business, News, O Canada

Oh Canada. Salesforce.com, the cloud based enterprise software company known best for their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products has been making its presence felt north of the border.

 

Their latest acquisition, Rypple Inc. was completed for an estimated $65 million dollars. The move indicates that Microsoft is opting to make the Toronto-based company part of its movement towards the future of software. According to a recent Financial Post piece, both parties and their leadership share a common vision of what they call social enterprise software.

 

The idea is not completely novel. Microsoft recently acquired Yammer for an impressive $1.2 billion in order to integrate their private social network technology and functionality into their Windows OS and Office Suite moving forward. The idea for Salesforce is similar; employees are more engaged in social media than ever, so why not bring that to any business down the line?

 

The timing could not be better according to Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, who sees parallels between social media use for personal reasons like Facebook and Twitter as well as its possibilities in the workplace. According to the former Oracle man, people’s familiarity with the concepts and functionality will allow them to leverage the technology to create a more collaborative and harmonious work place.

 

Since June of 2010, Salesforce has spent approximately half a billion in acquiring a myriad of Canadian companies to help them achieve their dream. Past acquisitions include SiteMasher ($20M in June 2010) and Radian6 Technologies (326 million in March 2011).

 

Salesforce is a publically traded company found on the NYSE (CRM) with a market capitalization of approximately $19 billion, the firm has been at the forefront of cloud computing. It will be interesting to see what Salesforce does with Rypple as well as how their either integrate social networking into their next generation software.