Well it goes a few weeks with nothing being announced and then **BAM** three big announcements within a week.  This week for Salesforce Briefs, we look at the big announcements in the Salesforce universe.  As per predictions for 2018, this week we see Salesforce announce the second major acquisition of 2018 (the first being Attic Labs) – announcing they are buying CloudCraze.  Salesforce also announced it was planning to deepening integration ties with Dropbox, and also splashed a cool, $100m IPO investment in the company.

To top off the week, Salesforce has also announce the retirement of Desk.com and SalesforceIQ.  While announcing a new Salesforce Essentials bundle, aimed at small businesses.

Read on for all things Salesforce, this week.

Acquisition #2 for 2018: Salesforce snaps up CloudCraze

Salesforce has made a huge play for the e-commerce market this week.  This week announcing that Salesforce buys CloudCraze.

CloudCraze is the B2B e-commerce solution for a number of household brand names like Coca-Cola.

It is yet another acquisition that first started with an investment from Salesforce Ventures (in 2017).

So what is the play here?  Well it is clear that Salesforce is beefing up its Commerce Cloud offering.  This acquisition feels very similar to past acquisitions of Pardot and Exact Target, allowing Salesforce to tackle the B2B & B2C markets.

Also as Salesforce continues to aim for growth towards $60bn by the 2030’s, one way to do that is to grow via acquisitions.  Just with the added advantage that also helps to diverse the market they cover…  So expect to see more acquisitions this year.

For an interesting take on this, read on here at CRN or the statement from CloudCraze and Salesforce here.

Salesforce drops $100m on Dropbox & announces new integrations

After first announcing a deeper level of integration with Dropbox for Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Quip.  Salesforce has followed up that announcement by investing $100m in Dropbox.

Will this be a potential acquisition in the future too?  It is too early to tell, but I would love to see it drive Salesforce to ‘catch up’, as the the cost of extra data storage from Salesforce is prohibitively expensive…

This potentially values Dropbox’s at anywhere between $7-8bn, which is staggering for a company that is not making a profit!

Additionally, SalesforceBen and ZDNet has a good breakdown of the integration with Dropbox.

Retirement for Desk.com & SalesforceIQ, but new Salesforce Essentials…

It is the end of the road for Desk.com and SalesforceIQ (well it will be in March 2020), as Salesforce has also announcement the retirement of Desk.com, SalesforceIQ and a number of other small business products.  These are products aimed at the Small/Medium Business (SMB) market, where customer either don’t want or need (or can’t afford) a full Salesforce Sales/Service Cloud solution…

Instead they have announced a new Salesforce Essentials SMB package aimed to getting small businesses onto the Salesforce ecosystem quicker, with an offering that is a more ‘out of the box’ solution that needs less setting up.

For a quick history lesson, Desk.com (or Assistly as it was called) was originally bought back in 2011, to help bolster Salesforce’s customer service/support credentials for small businesses.  Particularly if they couldn’t afford/had no interest in Service Cloud.

While SalesforceIQ was aimed at the sales side of the SMB market.  Attempting to streamline emails and drive sales productivity for the SMB market.  Surprise, surprise it was also a previous acquisition.  And it was brought into the Salesforce ecosystem back in 2014, after Salesforce bought RelateIQ.

Additional reading, can be found at TechRepublic and Diginomica.