Salesforce is on a bit of an acquisition spree this week. After purchasing marketing software company ExactTarget for $2.5 billion, the sales SaaS giant has announced the purchase of EdgeSpring, an enterprise business intelligence and analytics startup.
Though financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, this is likely a smaller acquisition for Salesforce. EdgeSpring just came out of stealth last month, raising $11 million in Series A funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Lightspeed Ventures. The EdgeSpring platform accelerates the building of analytics applications that parse business intelligence data like sales, financials and more. The company wants to allow businesses to derive insights from data of any size or structure. EdgeSpring says it enables applications to answer first and second order questions across structured and semi-structured data.
CEO and co-founder Vijay Chakravarthy, who previously worked at Salesforce, explained in May that part of EdgeSpring’s secret sauce is in its patent-pending technology. The core of the platform is built around EdgeMart, a powerful data store, and the Lens Framework, a dynamic visualization engine.
He writes on the company’s site, announcing the acquisition:
“Over the past two and a half years, we at EdgeSpring have built up a strong team and executed on bringing a next-generation decision-making platform to market. Business Intelligence and Analytics in the enterprise is a massively painful and IMHO still largely unsolved problem today. Being a part of Salesforce.com will give us a tremendous opportunity to take our technology to the next level and deliver truly amazing innovation to solve this high value problem.
Having worked at salesforce.com once before, I am also excited to be (re)joining a company that shares the values that we hold true here at EdgeSpring: being strongly customer centric and focused on bringing consumer-like ease of use to the enterprise.”
Despite being in stealth, EdgeSpring was able to accumulate a number of high-profile customers, including AppSense, Demandbase, Docusign, EllieMae, Equinix, Hara, HighWire, Intacct, Lithium, Neustar, Pandora, SpruceMedia, and Xactly.
It’s not surprising that Salesforce would be doubling down on business analytics and intelligence talent and software — no word yet on whether Salesforce will shut EdgeSpring down or continue to sell the technology.