Salesforce.com Looking to Make Acquisitions

Call it a sign of things to come: Salesforce.com says it intends to raise $500 million for acquisitions. While many small VARs continue to struggle with basic financing requests, Salesforce.com's news reinforces the fact that investment money continues to flow into the cloud and SaaS (software as a service) markets.

salesforce 500 million Call it a sign of things to come: Salesforce.com says it intends to raise $500 million for acquisitions. While many small VARs continue to struggle with basic financing requests, Salesforce.com’s news reinforces the fact that investment money continues to flow into the cloud and SaaS (software as a service) markets.

The examples go far beyond Salesforce.com. Just yesterday, LegalCloud told us they raised money to help fund an MSP and cloud strategy targeting the legal vertical. Other recent SaaS-oriented deals involve Carbonite raising $20 million, Spiceworks (hybrid SaaS and on-premise) raising $16 million , and VaultLogix raising an undisclosed sum.

Still, the bigger story is SaaS market consolidation. Salesforce.com is raising $500 million for “general corporate purposes” including “funding acquisitions.” No doubt, buyouts in the SaaS market are expected to accelerate this year. Only a few days ago, VMware snapped up Zimbra — an open source email provider — from Yahoo. More than 450 channel partners and hosting partners offer Zimbra through SaaS business models.

Back at Salesforce.com, it’s been an eventful week. In addition to the funding effort, Salesforce.com rolled out Spring ’10, the 31st generation of their successful platform.

For a nitty-gritty look at Salesforce.com’s funding plans, check out the press release. The $500 million war chest could potentially shake up the CRM and SaaS markets. Details are sparse at the moment, but The VAR Guy will be filling in the blanks as we find out more.