Salesforce Shakes Up Commerce With Demandware Buy

Salesforce is expanding its corporate cloud services thanks to a major acquisition worth an estimated $2.8 billion, reports said Wednesday (June 1).

The company will create its Salesforce Commerce Cloud solution with the takeover of Demandware, an enterprise cloud commerce platform. Salesforce said it expects to finalize the deal in the second quarter of its fiscal year, ending July 31, 2016.

“Demandware is an amazing company,” said Salesforce chairman and CEO Mark Benioff. “The Global cloud leader in the multi-billion dollar digital commerce market. With Demandware, Salesforce will be well-positioned to deliver the future of commerce as part of our Customer Success platform and create yet another billion dollar cloud.”

That billion dollar cloud is the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which will run under the firm’s Customer Success Platform, and provide an eCommerce-as-a-Service solution for corporations. According to the companies, Demandware clients will have access to Salesforce’s analytics, sales, IoT, platform and other enterprise solutions.

“Demandware and Salesforce share the same passionate focus on customer success,” said Demandware CEO Tom Ebling in another statement. “Becoming part of Salesforce will accelerate our vision to empower the world’s leading brands with the most innovative digital commerce solutions that enable them to connect 1:1 with customers across any channel.”

Salesforce was itself the rumored target for an acquisition earlier this year. Reports surfaced in April that IBM and Microsoft were both exploring an acquisition of the company; IBM ultimately purchased Salesforce-owned Bluewolf, a unit that services businesses looking to integrate Salesforce CRM tools into their operations.

As Salesforce continues its battle in enterprise Software-as-a-Service solutions against rivals SAP and Oracle, the company has also looked to strengthen its SME solutions, recently launching SME analytics capabilities as well as integrating ACH payments into its AppExchange payment processing tool.