Salesforce.com is to acquire two year old Canada-based GoInstant, a move the GoInstant founders say they are “beyond excited” about. It is easy to see why – Salesforce.com is paying c$70m in cash for the company, who has raised c$1.7m in seed funding and has around a dozen employees.
What is the attraction? GoInstant is in the social software area, providing tools to enable remote co-browsing of same web page by people in different physical locations. That could put it in the consumer social space but it has a business pitch and positions its paid for software as a business tool – a WebEx alternative in fact, that does not require client-side software. WebEx owner Cisco and Citrix with its GoToMeeting alternative will be facing a new competitor. The GoInstant value point is that it can be used by businesses to run sales presentations online, or customer support sessions. It will bolster Salesforce.com’s growing portfolio of social applications, complementing Chatter capabilities. Its prime value is likely to be extending Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud, sitting alongside products like the social helpdesk Desk.com and the BMC-originated Remedy force that Salesforce.com has repositioned as a social IT help desk.