A little over a month after announcing the $326 million acquisition of social media monitoring company Radian6, Salesforce has closed the deal. The purchase of Radian6 is Salesforce’s largest acquisition to date.
Radian6 helps clients like Dell, GE, Kodak and UPS monitor, analyze and engage in ‘hundreds of millions’ of social media conversations. Salesforce will be using Radian6’s technology to enhance all of its products, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Chatter and Force.com.
Specifically, Salesforce says the combination will create a “bridge between public conversations and Chatter” and “enhance the Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud products with social intelligence that customers can act on. Developers building on the Force.com platform also will be able to tap into the power of Radian6, putting the social web into everything they build.”
We’ve argued that Salesforce overpaid for Radian6, considering Salesforce paid nearly ten times Radian6′s revenues. Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff told reporters shortly after the deal was announced that the company needed to move quickly to acquire technology (as opposed to building it in-house) as more competitors move into the world of social enterprise. Salesforce CMO Kendall Collins told us it would have taken at least three years for Salesforce to build the technology in-house.
Now that Radian6 is finally part of the Salesforce family, it should be interesting to see how quickly the CRM giant can incorporate Radian6’s technology into its products.