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Salesforce buys Assistly for $50 million

By | September 21, 2011, 1:35pm PDT

Summary: The plan for Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud is obvious—land SMBs via Assistly and then have them grow up on the company’s platform.

Salesforce.com on Wednesday said it would acquire Assistly, a customer service help desk service, in a deal valued at $50 million.

In a statement, Salesforce.com said it would integrate Assistly with its Service Cloud service. Assistly integrates social media streams into help desk applications.

As previously reported, talk of Salesforce.com buying Assistly surfaced ahead of the Dreamforce conference. The two sides couldn’t agree on valuation in time.

Assistly’s tools allow all helpdesk streams—Twitter, Facebook, chats, phone and e-mail—to be integrated into one dashboard.

Salesforce.com said Assistly will give it a strong footprint with SMBs. The plan for Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud is obvious—land SMBs via Assistly and then have them grow up on the company’s platform.

The deal will cut non-GAAP earnings by 2 cents a share for the fiscal year ending Jan. 31.

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Topics

Salesforce.com Inc., Assistly, Help Desk, Call Centers, Sales Force Management, It Operations, Sales, Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.

Disclosure

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan has nothing to disclose. He doesn’t hold investments in the technology companies he covers.

Biography

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the technology and financial services industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.

For daily updates, follow Larry on Twitter.

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ASSisity?
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RE: Salesforce buys Assistly for $50 million
Iconax 23rd Sep
This is a good move by Salesforce, the whole area of Data Visulisation and digital dashboards is becoming so important in business with the constant proliferation of data. See iconax.wordpress.com for my latest blog on the subject
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