Salesforce Buys Cloud Infrastructure Startup Coolan

Salesforce has purchased San Francisco-based startup Coolan, which sells software to help scale up and optimise data centre infrastructure.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Coolan’s founders come from a background of pedigree.

Ex-Google

CEO Amir Michael previously headed up Facebook’s hardware teams that were responsible for the design and rollout of Facebook’s servers, and before that Michael worked at Google where he helped develop server infrastructure.

Fellow co-founder Yoni Michael worked at Google developing inefficiency-busting software for data centre infrastructure.

“Once the transaction has closed, the Coolan team will help Salesforce optimise its infrastructure as it scales to support customer growth around the world,” said Amir Michael.

Michael also played a part in founding the Open Compute Project, and said: “I will continue my work with the Open Compute Project to further its mission of making hardware open, efficient and scalable.”

Salesforce has yet to make an official statement on the acquisition, an acquisition that gives more questions than answers about Salesforce’s recent decision to outsource its cloud infrastructure to Amazon Web Services.

In May, the CRM giant knighted AWS with the honour of being its ‘preferred public cloud infrastructure provider’.

But Salesforce also said it will keep some of its critical CRM products on its own infrastructure. While Salesforce hasn’t contributed anything significant to the Open Compute Project so far, we could soon be seeing the company start helping out with open infrastructure designs for specific tasks now that it’s got Coolan on board. All this while Salesforce’s mega-scale infrastructure is happening with the help of AWS.

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