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Salesforce buys Dimdim for $31 million, bolsters Chatter collaboration

By | January 6, 2011, 1:21pm PST

Summary: Dimdim resembles Cisco’s WebEx and Citrix’s GoToMeeting. For Salesforce.com, those capabilities are a logical extension to Chatter.

Salesforce.com said Thursday that it will acquire Dimdim for $31 million in a move to add real-time communication technology to its Chatter platform.

Dimdim, founded in 2007, has presence, messaging and screen sharing technologies.  In a nutshell, Dimdim allows you to share screens, documents and communicate in meetings via a browser.

Salesforce.com said it will add to its development team with the Dimdim purchase. In many respects, Dimdim resembles Cisco’s WebEx and Citrix’s GoToMeeting. For Salesforce.com, those capabilities are a logical extension to Chatter. Salesforce.com said it will integrate Dimdim into Chatter, but has no plans to enter Web conferencing. Dimdim will cease as an independent product, but continue to support existing customers.

George Hu, director of Salesforce.com marketing, platform and corporate development, said on a conference call.

Our vision is that the market’s moving to an integrated collaboration and communication kind of platform, a la Facebook. So it made sense for us to really focus our efforts and our product development on that vision, and that, of course, means integrating it into Chatter. Also, we just really felt like, in terms of bringing it to Chatter, just continuing existing service would enable us to really maximize the speed at which we could really make that migration to this integrated vision. So that’s the basis of our decision.

In a statement, Salesforce.com reiterated its Facebook for the enterprise argument to justify the purchase.

The acquisition won’t have any impact on Salesforce.com’s fourth quarter revenue but will shave its non-GAAP earnings by a penny a share. For fiscal 2012, Salesforce expects the Dimdim purchase to shave about 4 cents a share to 5 cents a share from annual earnings.

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Topics

Salesforce.com Inc., WebEx Communications Inc., Citrix GoToMeeting, Dimdim, Sales Force Management, Sales, Larry Dignan

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

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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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RE: Salesforce buys Dimdim for $31 million, bolsters Chatter collaboration
upinson 28th Sep
@PowerTog
Deal Special dari KrisKros.com
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RE: Salesforce buys Dimdim for $31 million, bolsters Chatter collaboration
sdjhfksdjhfkj 6th Jan 2011
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RE: Salesforce buys Dimdim for $31 million, bolsters Chatter collaboration
shobhit@... 6th Jan 2011
Won't they have to make their Chatter platform Open Source as DimDim is Open Source project from start released under GPL. As per GPL terms, they must make available latest copy of the project available for download if they are using some other Open Source code in any way in their project.
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RE: Salesforce buys Dimdim for $31 million, bolsters Chatter collaboration
phil_ayres@... 7th Jan 2011
@shobhit@... my understanding of GPL was that you had to make any additions or enhancements freely available, back in the main project or outside. But if you plugged a GPL component into an existing stack, the component itself remains self contained and the stuff around the edge (Chatter in this case) does not have to be treated as part of the enhancement. If GPL touches something else, it doesn't make that GPL just through contact.

If what you say is correct and DimDim is GPL rather than LGPL then it will be interesting to know what Salesforce is actually acquiring.
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RE: Salesforce buys Dimdim for $31 million, bolsters Chatter collaboration
PowerTog 11th Feb 2011
Salesforce is making some very strategic moves purchasing infrastructure and acquiring human assets in the process.

I am very interested in seeing the outcome of the integration strategy.

Carl Sarfi
Business Growth Specialist
Maximum Business Performance, Inc.
http://www.DimDimAlternative.com
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RE: Salesforce buys Dimdim for $31 million, bolsters Chatter collaboration
upinson 28th Sep
@PowerTog
Deal Special dari KrisKros.com
Deal Special dari KrisKros.com
Deal Special dari KrisKros.com

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