Salesforce has made a strong (and not-cheap) venture into the world of eCommerce. Salesforce is an established cloud platform provider – focused on the CRM space, offering Service, Sales and Marketing Cloud tools. Today it has plugged a long time gap in its platform – namely Commerce by buying Demandware – a cloud eCommerce platform (src. Techcrunch.com June 1st 2016). This allows Salesforce to firmly compete in the Commerce space, pitching it against the likes of the “all powerful” Amazon, eBay and Magento to name by a few. Interestingly, the combined Salesforce company platform can cover Sales, Marketing, Service and Commerce capabilities for an organization – all via cloud based solutions – reliving a organization from the need to invest in its own on-premises infrastructure. Salesforce isn’t new to acquisitions – and pundits may note it’s track record of integrating these acquisitions technically often lags far behind the initial closing of the financial transaction.
At Connected Agency, we believe in the power of connected customer journeys to propel your brand (and it’s revenues) forward. For organizations laser focused on omni-channel customer success, this $2.8B acquisition could be a serious future platform contender (or bring new capabilities to existing customers). According to Gartner , it “estimates that worldwide spending on digital commerce platforms is expected to grow at over 14 percent annually, reaching $8.544 billion by 2020, according to figures provided by Salesforce.”