Salesforce Cuts Jobs After Radian6 And Buddy Media Mergers

Salesforce.com has announced layoffs following integration of two recent acquisitions, as it looks to move on with its Marketing Cloud initiative announced in September.

Radian6 and Buddy Media technologies, acquired in 2011 and 2012 respectively, form a major part of the Marketing Cloud, designed to “manage the entire social marketing lifecycle”. Using the service, companies can look across all social activities, buy ads on Facebook and other social networks, update their social sites and gain insight into how successful their changes have been, all in one suite.

But the integration of the three different businesses has led to some losing their jobs, as is often the case following mergers and acquisitions. Salesforce, which is led by CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff, said around 100 have lost their jobs across the world.

Salesforce forces workers out

“With the integration of Radian6 and Buddy Media, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is re-balancing its resources to support its growth, including moving from a hub to a distributed model for certain customer-facing roles, consolidating marketing and dramatically increasing investments in R&D,” a Salesforce.com spokesperson said.

“Fewer than 100 people were impacted globally.”

Salesforce.com was criticised for how much it paid for Radian6 – $326 million – and Buddy Media is a loss making company. Its losses totalled $20.6 million in the first six months of the year. Salesforce.com itself makes losses, but is focused on driving adoption and revenue before making serious profit.

It isn’t the only notable tech firm to have announced redundancies this month. Telecoms firm Alcatel-Lucent recently outlined plans to cut around 5,500 jobs by the end of 2013, many of which will go in Europe.

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