Among technology giants in the United States, salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM) took the crown for the highest acceleration of deals. In 2016, the software firm now worth more than $50 billion spent 120% more on acquisitions compared to the previous year. This is according to data that was made available by CB Insights.
In an interview with Fortune, Salesforce’s executive vice president of corporate development, John Somorjai indicated that the software company intended to continue taking an interest in startups focusing on the artificial intelligence space.
“In general, we continue to have a lot of interest in AI and am sure we are going to do more deals in that area,” Somorjai said.
Eye on talent
Part of Salesforce’s strategy in making acquisitions in the AI space involves not just buying those startups which possess unique technologies but also those ones which will bring valuable talent to the company. One example of this strategy at work is when Salesforce acquired MetaMind and managed to incentivize the owner, Richard Socher, who is one of the world’s leading deep learning specialists to stay on. As a testament to this fact, around 50% of the clouds that Salesforce owns are run by people who came in through an acquihire.
One of the areas that Salesforce is keeping away from, though, is marketing. This is because the company thinks the segment is overhyped at the moment. This includes mobile analytics and social media marketing. Other non-priority areas for Salesforce are enterprise resource planning systems and cloud financials.
Demand trends
Somorjai also added that in making acquisitions, Salesforce is largely driven by consumer trends. He gave the example of the $2.8 billion acquisition of DemandWare in mid-2016 which was influenced by the fact that there existed a gap in e-commerce.
As an investor through Salesforce Ventures, the software maker has put money in more than 200 firms since 2009. Of these, 175 firms are currently still active. About six of these companies have become publicly listed. Salesforce Ventures has also exited from 50 of these companies.
In Monday’s trading, Salesforce.com Inc rose by 0.17% to close the day at $76.16 a share.
