Will Every Enterprise Platform Become a Data Company? Salesforce Acquires Own Company in a Deal That Will Now Send Ripples Through the Sector | Blog
Salesforce has announced the acquisition of New-Jersey based Own Company, a prominent provider of data protection and data management solutions, for approximately $1.9 billion, with this move underscoring Salesforce’s strategic commitment to expand its capabilities as a comprehensive enterprise platform.
Originally focused on backup and restore, Own offers a comprehensive suite of data-centric solutions, including security, compliance, sandbox seeding, archiving, and a new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered product for extracting insights from historical data.
Its product portfolio extends to other specialized Salesforce solutions like nCino and Veeva Systems, with Own’s capabilities complementing Salesforce’s existing data security offerings. Notably, Own Company was also recently recognized as one of the preferred data ecosystem partners for Salesforce newly established Zero Copy Partner network.
With this acquisition causing ripples through the tech, AI and data sectors, we have used our insight and knowledge to decipher what this acquisition may mean for the future of Salesforce, as well as the rest of the marketplace.
Reach out to us to discuss this topic further with our expert analysts.
Strategic intent behind the acquisition:
Salesforce has doubled down on building data-centric product capabilities. This strategic shift, primarily focused on developing new products and forging strategic partnerships. In the process reflecting the company’s recognition of data as a cornerstone for its ‘Data + AI + customer relationship management (CRM)’ vision.
On the product side, Salesforce has consistently innovated its data-specific offerings. Its ‘Genie’ offering, introduced in 2022, has evolved into the Data Cloud, which has since become its fastest-growing product and is the very core of its AI revolution, in addition to sustained growth from Einstein and Tableau.
Following this, Salesforce has plans to launch one of its key offerings at the upcoming Dreamforce event, notably its new autonomous agent platform, Agentforce. Salesforce has made significant strides in product evolution, from the initial launch of Einstein in 2016, to the Einstein 1 Platform and the recent introduction of autonomous AI agents – Service Agent and Sales Agent.
On the partnerships, Salesforce has been actively forming data-centric partnerships with service providers, data companies, platforms, and enterprise platforms. Its recent Zero Copy Network brings together a wide range of ecosystem partners to deliver superior data integrations to enterprises while eliminating data duplication and dynamic data changes.
Salesforce’s recent partnership with Workday aims to establish a unified data foundation by leveraging back-office data from Workday and front-office data from Salesforce. This will enable new AI-powered use cases to enhance employee experience and introduce a new employee service agent offering. The partnership also includes seamless integration of Workday into Slack to facilitate easier access to core employee human resources (HR) and financial records within Slack.
Data will become increasingly pivotal for the successful scaling of enterprise AI initiatives. As businesses assess their AI investments, concerns around data-related topics such as management, readiness, privacy, and security are growing.
Overall, for Salesforce, the acquisition of Own Company at this juncture is strategic, addressing the growing data-specific concerns in the market. Notably, this move comes amidst a period of challenge for Salesforce.
The company has been actively seeking new avenues for growth, including expanding its international presence and targeting the small and medium-sized business (SME) segment to diversify its revenue streams. Given Own’s synergistic product portfolio and substantial customer base of over 7,000 clients, this will make sure to add to Salesforce’s growth ambitions.
Acquisition implications –
- For enterprises, this partnership will instill more trust and confidence in their generative AI (gen AI) investments with the Salesforce platform, in terms of data security and compliance, which may encourage them to make further strategic investments towards their AI-specific objectives
- For service providers, it will become important for them to proactively build capabilities and focused partnerships across such independent software vendor (ISVs) and take these to the market through their Salesforce-specific go-to-market (GTM) activities. This also presents an opportunity for them to collaborate with similar partners and jointly identify and address whitespaces in areas such as talent, internet protocol (IP), and market education to further augment their Salesforce services capabilities
- For ISVs and solution partners, the potential for additional and similar partnerships and acquisition opportunities is going to increase from here on. ISVs seeking to be acquired, should present a compelling case to Salesforce to position themselves for inclusion in the company’s ongoing acquisition spree
Going forward, we can expect Salesforce to make additional acquisitions of other successful ecosystem partners such as the previously mentioned nCino and Veeva Systems, as well as the likes of Conga, Copado, Pimly, Provar, and Flosum, to fill the existing gaps in its product portfolio and augment it further.
This will not just be limited to Salesforce either, as we expect other large enterprise platforms such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, ServiceNow, and Pega to follow suit. Moreover, the marketplace can now anticipate Salesforce to acquire some of its specialized service providers such as Coastal, OSF digital, and Slalom to bring life to its dying professional services arm, which the firm seemed to be struggling with for quite some time.
Our analysis and insight see us conclude that Salesforce’s acquisition of the Own Company is as a prominent one for the industry as a whole and will be sure to now start a domino effect globally, especially across major enterprise platforms with lofty AI ambitions.
If you found this blog interesting, we have recently published an in-depth analysis of key Salesforce service providers which analyses their key capabilities and the impact they deliver to the market through their Salesforce services https://www2.everestgrp.com/reportaction/EGR-2024-50-R-6551/Marketing.
If you have any questions or want to discuss this acquisition and the effects it’ll have on the sector in the future, please contact Arun Prateek [email protected] and or AS Yamohiadeen [email protected].