Shopaholic Salesforce flashes $1.35bn, sucks up field service biz ClickSoftware into cloudy arm

Cloudy CRM giant Salesforce has splashed $1.35bn acquiring Israeli software company ClickSoftware, its latest spending-spree purchase.

In June, Salesforce shelled out $15bn on data visualisation biz Tableau.

Click provides field service management software, with features including scheduling and dispatch, capacity planning and demand forecasting. Current customers include Bosch and Vodafone. It was founded in 1997 and is backed by private equity firm Francisco Partners.

Recent financial information on the company is hard to come by, noted Megabuyte analyst Lee Prout. "But in its last full year as a public company, to December 2014, Click achieved adjusted EBITDA of $4.4m on revenues of $126m, up from -$0.3m and $103m respectively."

Salesforce reported a 26 per cent increase in revenue to $13.28bn in its full-year results.

The business will form part of the company's Service Cloud, which generated revenues of $3.6bn in the year ended January 2019, said Pout. It will be closely linked to Salesforce's Field Service Lightning service, which focuses on connecting call centres with field workers, and to which Click has partnered since 2016, he added.

Bill Patterson, head of Salesforce Service Cloud, said field service is an increasingly important priority for companies across industries "with more than 70 per cent of customer service leaders making significant investments to transform their mobile workforce".

He added: "Our acquisition of ClickSoftware will not only accelerate the growth of Service Cloud, but drive further innovation with Field Service Lightning to better meet the needs of our customers. We are thrilled to welcome the ClickSoftware team to Salesforce." ®