SteelBrick Acquires Salesforce's Biggest Deal Over the Year and a half

    Salesforce again thought about expanding the cloud business. The company specializes in developing software for the SaaS model, including services for sales automation. It was previously known that Salesforce was in talks to buy software maker SteelBrick for $ 600 million.

    Today, however, Business Insider, citing documentation from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), said Wednesday that Salesforce bought a 6-year-old startup for $ 360 million on Wednesday. The deal is scheduled to close in April 2016. Salesforce is an investor in SteelBrick. It is assumed that the company will pay most of the purchase with its shares.

    The takeover of SteelBrick was Salesforce's biggest deal in the past year and a half. Prior to that, in July 2014, the company bought RelateIQ for $ 390 million.

    SteelBrick offers comprehensive technology that makes it easier for sellers to create orders for goods and invoicing customers. The solution simplifies sales by automating the process of creating a product offer and the financial terms of the contract, as well as reducing the volume of paper documentation. According to Gartner analysts, the market for such software will grow to $ 41 billion by 2018.

    SteelBrick recently completed a new round of financing, following which the company raised $ 48 million in investment and received a business valuation of $ 250 million. Thus, Salesforce will pay for this software developer almost one and a half times its cost.

    Megamind wrote that in mid-September, the company announced plans to launch an Internet of Things ( IoT ) cloud platform for smart devices. At the same time, Salesforce officially added it to its cloud analytic service Wave Analytics Cloud , released last year in the interests of government organizations.

    The new IoT cloud platform will be available for both large and small companies, giving them effective opportunities to work with "big data", which are the products of the IoT devices. Thus, any company will be able to enter the IoT market without deploying its own infrastructure.

    From this point, Salesforce is ready to become a smart city solution provider, entering direct competition with companies such as IBM and Cisco .

    The American company Salesforce, the developer of the eponymous CRM system, is one of the largest cloud service providers in the world. Under the name Force.com, the company provides a PaaS platform for self-development of applications, and under the brand Database.com - a cloud-based database management system.

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