Salesforce acquires data center analytics startup Coolan
Coolan, a startup that developed software for analyzing data about data center hardware, today announced that it has been acquired by Salesforce. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. — It was not long ago that Coolan launched.
Context & Ripple Effects
Coolan was barely a year and a half old: ex-Facebook employees launched it into private beta in early 2015 selling predictive analytics for data center hardware, and Salesforce has now bought it outright with terms undisclosed. The deal is the middle piece of a 2016 capability spree — it follows Salesforce's February purchase of PredictionIO for machine learning, and an August acquisition of analytics startup BeyondCore lands just weeks after this one.
First-order effects
- Coolan's team and its data-center hardware analytics technology move in-house at Salesforce, ending the startup's run as an independent vendor.
- Salesforce gains visibility into the physical infrastructure layer beneath its cloud at a moment when it is simultaneously buying up machine learning tooling.
Second-order effects
- The rapid launch-to-acquisition exit sets a reference price point for other young infrastructure-analytics startups courting enterprise software buyers.
- Rival SaaS platforms without comparable analytics and ML stacks face pressure to acquire or build equivalents, since Salesforce is assembling them piece by piece.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large SaaS incumbents treat sub-scale infrastructure and AI startups as talent-and-capability tuck-ins rather than product lines — a playbook that scales up dramatically by 2024, when Salesforce pays roughly $1.9B for data management firm Own Company in a far larger version of the same move.
The trend: Enterprise software incumbents are acquiring young infrastructure-analytics startups as capability tuck-ins, compounding small deals like Coolan into a serial build-out of AI and data-center expertise.