Salesforce Buys ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion
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Salesforce Buys ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion
1–10 of 54 posts
Re: Salesforce Buys ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion
#2I would comment on this, but DHH has captured my thoughts nearly exactly on Twitter today: http://twitter.com/dhh
This is insane. $2.5b for a company that has lost money through its existence, has a very small set of (likely not-so-diverse) clients (6,000ish), and makes 10% of what they paid for them in revenue? Strikes me as a crazy purchase, but perhaps there's something else afoot that I don't see. I've been proven wrong about this stuff before.
Re: Salesforce Buys ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion
#3Here's some perspective from someone deep within the Salesforce ecosystem: Salesforce has very concretely and deliberately pursued the "imperial" approach in the B2B/Enterprise market, which is to do a careful survey of existing products in a particular space, the potential revenue to be gained from expanding into that space, and what is needed to get a heads up on existing products.
As is generally the case in the enterprise space, this means providing more features than the competitors. There is also a network effect in that the more features and integration points a particular platform has, the more valuable it is.
Salesforce has done this extremely effectively, from salesforce automation, to customer relations management, to customer service, etc. In many cases now it is virtually unimaginable not to use Salesforce, since the feature set is so extensive. One note here is that although the UI has had its warts, Salesforce is actually has a much better UI experience compared to most other enterprise apps (lightweight competitors tend to be better, but not deliver the feature set).
In any case, marketing is a natural extension for Salesforce at this point and I have ever reason to expect they will be successful at dominating this market segment just as they have in other sectors and points on the value chain. If they have to pay a bit of a stock price premium in order to do so that's not a lot of sweat off Benioff's brow.
Re: Salesforce Buys ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion
#4I would comment on this, but DHH has captured my thoughts nearly exactly on Twitter today: http://twitter.com/dhh This is insane. $2.5b for a company that has lost money through its existence, has a very small set of (likely not-so-diverse) clients (6,000ish), and makes 10% of what they paid for them in revenue ? Strikes me as a crazy purchase, but perhaps there's something else afoot that I don't see. I've been prov…
In the quotes they seem to playing on the "CMO will eventually have a bigger budget than the CIO" card. Whether this is a reasonable expectation, I don't know, but there seems to be the expectation of explosive growth in this sector. (I don't know the numbers or how Heroku has grown since but Salesforce did pick up Heroku relatively early in the cloud hosting lifecycle too.)
Re: Salesforce Buys ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion
#5"Salesforce is paying $33.75 a share, which amounts to an 11.7 percent premium over yesterday’s closing price of $22.10. Salesforce shares are down by more than 2 percent, or $40.16, in pre-market trading on the news."
How does any of that math make sense? Since when does 2% of $22.10 amount to $40.16, or is my brain just not working so early in the morning?
Re: Salesforce Buys ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion
#6I use Exact Target, every day, and I'm very happy with their product and their service. I won't speak to the valuation, but their technology and application is great.
Re: Salesforce Buys ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion
#7"Salesforce is paying $33.75 a share, which amounts to an 11.7 percent premium over yesterday’s closing price of $22.10. Salesforce shares are down by more than 2 percent, or $40.16, in pre-market trading on the news." How does any of that math make sense? Since when does 2% of $22.10 amount to $40.16, or is my brain just not working so early in the morning?
Exact Target shares were at 22.10. Salesforce shares are at 40.16.
Re: Salesforce Buys ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion
#8"Salesforce is paying $33.75 a share, which amounts to an 11.7 percent premium over yesterday’s closing price of $22.10. Salesforce shares are down by more than 2 percent, or $40.16, in pre-market trading on the news." How does any of that math make sense? Since when does 2% of $22.10 amount to $40.16, or is my brain just not working so early in the morning?
It's awkwardly worded but they meant that the salesforce stockprice ( not exact targets) is down 2% to its (at the time current) stock price of 40.16. As you can see from this link, http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CRM. Its now down to around 39.56, a 3.59% decrease.
Re: Salesforce Buys ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion
#9Here's some perspective from someone deep within the Salesforce ecosystem: Salesforce has very concretely and deliberately pursued the "imperial" approach in the B2B/Enterprise market, which is to do a careful survey of existing products in a particular space, the potential revenue to be gained from expanding into that space, and what is needed to get a heads up on existing products. As is generally the case in the e…
I completely agree. SFDC is really looking for a quick toe hold to get into the market and Exact Target gives them a ready made product and a solid base to integrate with their existing platforms. From there, it's a simple up sell to existing SFDC clients.
Re: Salesforce Buys ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion
#10What does exacttarget do?