Salesforce is continuing its shopping spree into 2011. The company has announced that it has acquired DimDim, a web conferencing service for $31 million in cash.
DimDim, which has raised around $9 million in venture funding, provides a browser-based web conferencing platform that doesn’t require the installation of any desktop software and is based on an open source platform. The platform provides real-time collaboration capabilities, the ability to share documents, record sessions, whiteboard and use video, voice and phone conferencing.
Salesforce.com says that it will use DimDim’s real-time communication technologies in its social collaboration platform, Chatter. Interestingly, while the CRM giant has previously backed away from facebook comparisons to Chatter, Salesforce said that the integration between Chatter and DimDim will mirror “the proven Facebook model of combining collaboration and communication into an integrated service.”
From the release, it really sounds like Salesforce wants to create the Facebook for the enterprise. From the release:
Today, Facebook has proven the value of integrated collaboration and communication, with services like presence and messaging, which helped fuel user adoption, making it the world’s most popular Internet site. Salesforce.com followed a similar path when it introduced the Salesforce Chatter collaboration platform. Today, more than 60,000 customers have deployed Chatter since its release in June — making it the company’s most-popular product. Now with Dimdim, salesforce.com is following Facebook’s lead once again. By offering an integrated collaboration and communication platform, the company believes it will drive greater Chatter adoption, increase customer loyalty and differentiate its entire product portfolio.
So perhaps Salesforce will add the ability to hold web conferences and share screens to Chatter? It seems from the statement, that the company definitely wants to make Chatter a communication platform. Adding features like real-time chat, voice calling and more should help Chatter become more Facebook-like.
For Salesforce, this is the third public acquisition in the past month. The company bought email contact manager Etacts, and Heroku for $212 million in cash.