Salesforce.com confirms it has completed the acquisition of Buddy Media
Salesforce.com has confirmed that it has completed the acquisition of Buddy Media more than two months after the enterprise software giant first revealed that a $689 million deal to buy the social media-focused site had been reached.
Context & Ripple Effects
The close ends a short arc: AllThingsD first reported Salesforce's interest in late May at what it then estimated at more than $800 million (initially valued above $800 million), and Salesforce announced the final terms — $689 million in cash and shares — on June 4 (the June announcement). Two months later the paperwork is done, and the pickup spread across ZDNet, CNET, VentureBeat, Forbes and InfoWorld on completion day.
For Salesforce this is a familiar playbook: it bought Heroku in December 2010 for roughly $212 million to add a developer platform, and Buddy Media adds a Facebook-centric social marketing business on top of the CRM franchise — the ZDNet pickup even frames the news around building Chatter out toward community collaboration.
First-order effects
- Buddy Media's brand customers and its Facebook page-management tooling are now inside Salesforce, which gains a social marketing layer to attach to its existing CRM and Chatter products.
Second-order effects
- Standalone social-media management vendors lose pricing cover: Salesforce can now bundle social marketing with CRM contracts, forcing independent tools to compete on product rather than point-solution convenience.
Third-order effects
- If the Heroku-then-Buddy-Media sequence holds, Salesforce is assembling a full marketing-and-platform suite through acquisition, pushing the industry toward consolidated cloud suites and leaving unbought specialists facing a shrinking list of potential acquirers.
The trend: Enterprise SaaS leaders are buying their way from core CRM into adjacent social and marketing clouds, consolidating point tools into single-vendor suites.