Salesforce.com Inc. isn’t wasting any time putting its new acquisitions to use in a bid to strengthen its business software against larger rivals such as Microsoft Corp. New products unveiled Tuesday will blend the company’s services with Quip, the document company Salesforce purchased in August for about $600 million.
Salesforce will enable customers to place data and records from its services inside Quip’s spreadsheets and word-processing documents, the company announced at its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. The integration also makes it simple for clients to sign into Quip and provides features that make it easy to access or create files from within Salesforce.
“It really means that your productivity tool in Quip is really tightly integrated” with Salesforce, Bret Taylor, Quip’s chief executive officer, said in a briefing.
Salesforce is ramping up acquisitions this year, spending more than about $4 billion -- and pursuing even larger deals -- while it searches for new ways to compete with bigger and more well-heeled rivals such as Microsoft, Oracle Corp. and SAP SE. The company fell short in a bid for LinkedIn Corp. won by Microsoft, and most recently expressed interest in Twitter Inc., the social media company. A deal for Twitter would provide data on executives, managers and other key contacts for Salesforce customers around the world.
Last month, Salesforce unveiled Commerce Cloud, a service built on the purchase earlier this year of Demandware for almost $3 billion, its biggest such deal on record. It also is pushing out an “Einstein” feature -- bolstered by other acquisitions in past quarters that were smaller -- that provides artificial intelligence capabilities for customers.
