Salesforce.com on Wednesday announced its definitive decision to buy Jigsaw, the business data provider for $142 Million in cash, plus a performance-based earn out of up to 10% of the purchase-price. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of fiscal year 2011.
The announcement caught a lot of people by surprise because the last significant purchase by Salesforce was for InStranet at $31.5m, in August 2008 and the latest purchase was for almost 5 times the cost of previous one, making it the biggest acquisition for the software company till date.
Many believe that the acquisition of Jigsaw is a strategic move by Salesforce to mark its entry into the growing $3 billion market for cloud based data services market and to create opportunities for Salesforce to partner with other data providers like Hoover’s, LexisNexis and Dun & Bradstreet.
But being a part of LeadForce1, the only platform that integrates both Salesforce and Jigsaw for its users, I would like to believe that Jigsaw’s acquisition is a smart move by Salesforce to converge the social processes into its overall CRM strategy at a time when it is clearly moving towards a more dynamic system where lead quality and quantity will be directly impacted by the system and not depend on the user input.
At LeadForce1 we are happy with the news of this acquisition, it is a validation of our marketing automation 2.0 technology, which foresaw this need in the B2B space and tied up with Jigsaw long back, providing our clients with all relevant information on their enterprise visitors or leads – ranging from their names to details on the company size, revenue and direct contact numbers, coupled with our analysis on the intent of the enterprise visitor and his browsing behavior on multiple visits. Ensuring the process of Lead management is more accurate and fruitful even in the absence of form-fills.
The acquisition of Jigsaw will see vendors whose applications are integrated with the Salesforce CRM platform taking advantage of the business information aggregated by Jigsaw in the near future.
The distinct and immediate advantage LeadForce1 users will have over others using similar solutions, is the fact that such business information provided by Jigsaw, is already accessible to them at no extra cost but as part of the Lead identification and Lead Qualification solutions provided by LeadForce1.
This acquisition is bound to have some long lasting implications; it has the ability to make the entire sales process faster, easier and more targeted.
For us, Jigsaw has been a very important partner for more than a year and Salesforce is the CRM platform of choice for most of our customers, so the integration between the two most important players for us is welcome, especially when we have seen for ourselves the value such integration can add for clients in the B2B space.
