Salesforce Receives Takeover Approach

Salesforce is reportedly an acquisition target for as of yet unnamed suitor in what would be major shakeup in the enterprise cloud market.

Bloomberg says the Cloud CRM giant is working with financial advsiers following the approach, which could only have been made by one of a number of enterprise players with the financial capability of making such an acquisition.

This includes database giant Oracle, Microsoft, and even German software specialist SAP, although the latter has publicly ruled out any major acquisitions.

Takeover Approach

The Bloomberg report stated that there is no certainty any deal will transpire, but that didn’t stop shares in Salesforce jumping 11.6 percent in New York trading Wednesday. Its current share price values Salesforce at a whooping $49 billion, or £31.7bn in real money.

Salesforce meanwhile refused to speculate when TechweekEurope contacted it about the takeover approach.

“We do not comment on rumour and speculation,” said a company spokesperson.

All three possible suitors have their own customer relationship management (CRM) technologies, but Salesforce is currently the market leader here according to Gartner research.  Reports have suggested Oracle is the most likely suitor, but it is far from the only potential buyer.

Last year, Microsoft and Salesforce finally settled their bitter rivalry when they publicly buried the hatchet with a global partnership agreement. That deal allowed Salesforce CRM apps and platform to connect to Microsoft Office and the Windows operating system, as well as the Windows Phone mobile OS.

European Expansion

Salesforce is currently expanding its European customer base, as witnessed by the rollout of three European data centres last year, including one in Britain. The company actually first pledged a UK data centre back in 2012, but it took a while to choose an adequate partner and a suitable location.

In May 2013, it finally signed a deal to build a data centre in Slough, and in March 2014 announced that its UK data centre would open in August.

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