Gravitytank have announced on their blog that they are joining Salesforce as Benioff makes another acquisition. As Eric Dreshfield mentioned in his blog post, Salesforce has spent over $4 Billion on company acquisitions this year. Is this just a buying spree or a set of well timed moves. Unfortunately we can’t see how much this number has grown due to the price of Gravitytank remaining undisclosed.
Gravitytank is an innovation consultancy, it helps its clients disrupt current markets and enter new ones, whilst always staying ahead of the innovation curve. If you’ve been following the latest and previous set of acquisitions by Salesforce, you will know that this one bucks the trend.
Why would Salesforce be interested in such a company? Two ideas spring to mind..
1. Have expertise on transformation strategy and design, for example knowledge on entering new markets such as AI with their product Einstein due to be released at Dreamforce this year.
2. Access to a huge client base of successful organisations/promising future beacons of innovation. Could this be a platform for even more acquisitions?!
As always though, we will have to wait a while until we find out the exact classification of Gravitytank in the Salesforce suite of products/services.
“Over the past 16 years, we’ve strived to combine design, research and strategy to bring clarity to the challenges of innovation. And we look forward to continuing that work at Salesforce, where we’ll be able to pursue our passion for helping customers around the world identify new business opportunities, reinvigorate their brands and disrupt their industries, on a much larger scale as part of the world’s #1 CRM platform.” – Shailesh Patel (Partner)