Salesforce.com on Wednesday said it acquired Radian6, a social media monitoring service, for $326 million in cash and stock. 
The deal, which is expected to close in the quarter ending July 31, gives Salesforce technology to monitor, track and analyze social media across properties like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, youTube and other sites. Radian6, which counts GE, Dell and UPS as customers, will bolster the technologies included in Chatter and other Salesforce properties.
Radian6 will fall under Salesforce’s CRM unit.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Radian6 will give the company social media monitoring technology that will be “a huge opportunity.” The idea is that Radian6’s listening platform will enable companies to better market and sell products—and obviously tie into Salesforce’s offerings.
On a conference call, Benioff said:
Our customers are asking us for a way to capture these conversations and tightly integrate them with Salesforce.com products and services and we believe that today’s announcement is going to do just that and more. And with the combination of Salesforce and Radian6 the companies going to be able to bring the heart of the public social Web directly into their business. You’re going to see, as I’ve mentioned, for these sales and service cloud customers that we have the ability for us to quickly extend the value of their deployments by providing this actionable social intelligence. And we’ve seen it with our customers already where they’re receiving these feeds from Radian6 and they want to immediately act on them right inside our offerings.
Specifically, Radian6 will tie into the following Salesforce properties:
- Sales Cloud and Service Cloud;
- Chatter, which will absorb Radian6 monitoring tools;
- Force.com, which will use Radian6 tools to build the app ecosystem.
Salesforce.com said it will issue $10 million in stock and $4 million in cash to Radian6 founders vesting over two years.
As for the financial hit, Salesforce said that Radian6 will cut non-GAAP earnings by 8 cents a share in the July quarter and boost revenue by $5 million. For fiscal 2012, Radian6 will cut non-GAAP earnings by 11 cents a share and boost revenue by $45 million to $50 million. The company is projecting fiscal 2012 non-GAAP earnings of $1.24 a share to $1.27 a share on revenue of $2.075 billion to $2.1 billion.
