Here is a piece from the Digits blog at wsj.com.
“Salesforce.com said Wednesday that it would pay at least $142 million to acquire lead-generation startup Jigsaw, the biggest acquisition to date for the online software company.
The move comes as companies throughout the industry gear up for a period of consolidation. Salesforce.com, which has made relatively few deals in its history, recently hired several mergers and acquisition specialists and in January raised $575 million in debt.
(The debt—and the notion that Salesforce was gearing up to make acquisitions—was the subject of a story in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.)
Salesforce has had its eye on Jigsaw for several years, but only got serious about a possible deal a few months ago, says Kendall Collins, Salesforce’s chief marketing officer. Jigsaw is basically a big database filled with contact information for potential customers. It’s “crowd sourced,” meaning users submit, update and fact check the information themselves. There’s already a version of Jigsaw that’s built on Salesforce’s systems and allows for contacts from Jigsaw to be easily copied into Salesforce’s sales-automation software.
Salesforce.com has been marketing itself as a “platform” that other companies can build applications on. Does buying one of these companies send a bad message that it will play favorites?”
Read the full article here.
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