Salesforce.com Adds $575 million in Private Funding, What to Spend it On?

Earlier this week, Salesforce.com (news, site) announced the closing of private placement funding in the amount of US$ 575 million. It comes in the form of convertible senior notes due 2015.

Salesforce.com says these notes are unsecured, unsubordinated obligations, with interest being paid semi-annually at a rate of 0.75% per year.

According to the company, they expect to use some of the funds for general purposes which could include an acquisition or two, maybe a joint venture or something similar.

Tom Foremski, of ZDNet, sees social media as a prime acquisition market for Salesforce.com. He mentioned SocialText, Six Apart and BrightIdea as potential acquisition targets. All are already in the enterprise arena, so it may not take as much work to get them integrated and into the hands of Salesforce.com customers.

And social media does make sense. Many enterprise content management vendors are integrating social media capabilities into their solutions, many social computing vendors are talking more and more about the integration of business and social networking and social media capabilities.

With Salesforce.com offering a host of cloud based business services, integrating the much in demand social media capabilities seem almost a requirement to stay competitive. And they have already started with their own Salesforce Chatter service offering, but they could go much further.

But what will they actually do with the money? We'll be watching to see what they do next.

comments

Useful article?

 Email It      

Follow @cmswire

Related Articles:

• Knowledge Management in 2012? Probably Dead
• Social Business = Humanized Business
• Google Likely to Release Android 5.0 'Jelly Bean' by Q2

Tags: cloud computing, enterprise 2.0, saas, salesforce.com, six apart, social computing, socialtext

Earlier this week, Salesforce.com (news, site) announced the closing of private placement funding in the amount of US\$ 575 million. It comes in the form of convertible senior notes due 2015.

Salesforce.com says these notes are unsecured, unsubordinated obligations, with interest being paid semi-annually at a rate of 0.75% per year.

According to the company, they expect to use some of the funds for general purposes which could include an acquisition or two, maybe a joint venture or something similar.

Tom Foremski, of ZDNet, sees social media as a prime acquisition market for Salesforce.com. He mentioned SocialText, Six Apart and BrightIdea as potential acquisition targets. All are already in the enterprise arena, so it may not take as much work to get them integrated and into the hands of Salesforce.com customers.

And social media does make sense. Many enterprise content management vendors are integrating social media capabilities into their solutions, many social computing vendors are talking more and more about the integration of business and social networking and social media capabilities.

With Salesforce.com offering a host of cloud based business services, integrating the much in demand social media capabilities seem almost a requirement to stay competitive. And they have already started with their own Salesforce Chatter service offering, but they could go much further.

But what will they actually do with the money? We'll be watching to see what they do next.