Salesforce.com was the first enterprise company to ‘get’ the cloud. It was probably also the first enterprise company to ‘get’ social technologies as it proved with its launch of the highly success Chatter. Today it demonstrates this even more with the acquisition of Radian6 for c$356m ($276m in cash, rest in shares) Radian6 is used ‘by half of the Fortune 100’ to monitor 100s of millions of ‘conversations’ on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, blogs etc. What consumers say about you on social media is now of critical importance for firms. Reputations can be made – or destroyed – if news goes ‘viral’. Knowing what is trending at least gives you some notice – maybe enough to do something about it. I’ve heard that British Airways was very attentive to Twitter posts from T5 during the snow last year. Going out of its way to help before the situation went out of control. Someone even told me that the fastest way to get BA’s attention was via a Tweet!
Salesforce expects the transaction to increase revenues by a pretty minor $50m in FY12 – out of a total $2.1b expected.