Salesforce buys Dimdim

Deal

Salesforce has dished out $31 million in cash to pick up fellow US firm Dimdim.

The company specialises in creating applications for cloud communication platforms and offers a free web-conferencing service.

By acquiring the relatively small firm, headquartered in Boston, Salesforce hopes to boost its Chatter social collaboration tool with the real-time technologies owned by Dimdim.

Comparing the capabilities to those of the world's largest social network, Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive (CEO) of Salesforce, said: "Facebook has fundamentally changed the way we communicate in our personal lives."

"The acquisition of Dimdim will help salesforce.com deliver to the enterprise the same integrated collaboration and communication experience that made Facebook the world's most popular internet site."

Although Dimdim will continue to run for its existing customers during the transition process, it has stopped taking new registrations until the deal is done.

"From our start, Dimdim has focused on enabling real-time communication in the cloud, with no software," said DD Ganguly, CEO of Dimdim.

"Salesforce.com gives us the opportunity to apply our expertise and align our vision of real-time, social enterprise software in the cloud at a scale that wouldn't have been otherwise possible."

This is not the only acquisition Salesforce has completed recently. Back in December, during its annual Dreamforce user conference, the company announced it had splashed out $212 million on Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider Heroku.

Benioff claimed the company had "some of the best computer science" he had ever seen and would help his company become a leader in providing PaaS.

Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.