I remember there was a song that was pretty popular a few years ago called “If I had a Million Dollars,” by the Bare Naked Ladies. That song seems childish and silly compared to the spending spree that Salesforce.com has been on over the past several months. The two main acquisitions by Salesforce that give [...]

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Many have probably seen that Salesforce.com has acquired web conferencing tools provider DimDim for $31m. (The rumors of this deal had been percolating since before Dreamforce so for many this was no surprise at all.) The deal pits Salesforce.com in many ways against some big companies and very popular products – Citrix’s GoToMeeting and Cisco’s Webex, [...]

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I think I would have preferred to call this one 1/100000000000th of a good idea…but it was less catchy. Today Salesforce.com announced it will acquire business contacts data service Jigsaw for $142m. The move leaves Salesforce.com with the ability to pre-load CRM accounts with data – OR – which is more likely, charge a premium [...]

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Conversations with customers I’ve recently conducted have garnered some feedback about the vendor market and providers who are simply repackaging existing products to sell or failing to deliver on promised functionality. With legacy vendors in particular you see this still being a common problem, or with companies that are acquisition happy and simply repackaging a [...]

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I recently came across this Forbes article in the June issue by Sramana Mitra detailing some of the expected M&A activity in the SaaS space, including Citrix Systems, SuccessFactors, and NetSuite as possible targets. With many of these venture-funded businesses seeing their funding drying up, I imagine plenty of these companies will get acquired. On-premise [...]

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Plenty throughout the industry have talked about how cloud computing is blurring the lines between hardware and software. Traditional providers such as Cisco are in a perfect position to begin offering cloud computing services if and when they choose. But you’re starting to see M&A activity reflect the blurring boundaries between hardware and software as [...]

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One of the first BIG issues I worked on while a journalist with CRM magazine had Tom Siebel as the cover story. This was back in October of 2002. Now, realize, this was NOT Siebel’s heydey – but quite the opposite. Still, it was a great interview in a lot of ways. The CRM Magazine [...]

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Just wanted to comment on the positive numbers my ex-associate at the 451 Group and very brilliant M&A analyst Brenon Daly put together showing the deal trends so far in 2009. As noted in his recent blog post – April was a banner month for deals, even in this economy. Total deals in the sector [...]

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