Credit:
With the acquisition, Salesforce.com aims to give the company's Chatter communications platform "the same integrated collaboration and communication experience that made Facebook the world's most popular Internet site," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO. Salesforce.com introduced Chatter in June and currently claims 60,000 users.
The purchase and planned upgrade of Chatter's features is part of what Salesforce.com sees as a switch to "Cloud 2," the next generation of cloud computing, which will be more social, mobile and real-time. Another part of this Cloud 2 shift was Salesforce's $212 million acquisition of Heroku, a cloud-based platform for Ruby web development.