Marc Benioff and company are at it again with a new move to enhance Salesforce’s cloud-based offerings as it shifts to embrace what its outspoken CEO terms “Cloud 2.” To Benioff, Cloud 2 represents a coming evolution in enterprise apps, whereby applications are hosted in the cloud and encompass the same sorts of social and collaborative features en vogue now with sites like Facebook.
Today’s step in that direction is the software-as-a-service CRM giant’s acquisition of Jigsaw Data Corp., a firm specializing in crowd-sourced business contact information. eCRM Guide takes a look at the implications.
Salesforce said it will cough up $142 million in cash to acquire Jigsaw Data Corp., a privately held provider of crowd-sourced data services in the cloud.
Jigsaw, based in San Mateo, Calif., uses a Wikipedia-like Web site to collect real-time business contact data in the cloud. The acquisition dovetails with Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) CEO Marc Benioff’s “Cloud 2” vision, which calls for the addition of more social networking and real-time access to data in cloud-based applications.
