Salesforce announced yesterday that they were acquiring Own Company, one of the largest Salesforce Backup providers in the ecosystem in a deal worth $1.9B in cash, net of the value of the approximately 10% of outstanding shares currently owned by Salesforce.
This deal is the largest since Slack back at the tail end of 2020 and marks an important milestone both for Salesforce and the wider ecosystem. Let’s dig into the details and look at how this shakes things up…
Who Are Own Company?
Own Company, previously called Own Backup until they rebranded last year, is a modern startup success story in the Salesforce ecosystem. Founded in Israel by Ariel Berkman, Ori Yankelev, and entrepreneur Sam Gutmann in 2015, Own has risen to fame as one of the largest and most valuable companies in the ecosystem.
Although originally focusing on backup and restore products, Own have a range of data-focused products covering security, compliance, sandbox seeding, archiving, and a new product focussing on gleaning insights via AI from historical data.
“We’re excited to join forces with Salesforce, a company that shares our commitment to data resilience and security. Together with Salesforce, we’ll deliver even greater value for our customers by driving innovation, securing data, and ensuring compliance in the world’s most complex and highly regulated industries.” Sam Gutmann, CEO, Own
In total, Own has raised over $500M from VCs in the past decade, with the last Series E valuing them at $3.35B in a $240M round. This has propelled the data company to acquire over 7,000 customers. Whilst most of these are presumably in the Salesforce space, Own has also expanded its product portfolio to specialized Salesforce products nCino and Veeva, as well as the ecosystems of Microsoft and ServiceNow.
This deal marks a major milestone for Salesforce, as this is the largest acquisition they have made in nearly 4 years. It’s also one of the largest acquisitions they have ever done, just behind ExactTarget (Marketing Cloud) at $2.5B, and ahead of Vlocity (Salesforce Industries) at $1.33B.
“Data security has never been more critical, and Own’s proven expertise and products will enhance our ability to offer robust data protection and management solutions to our customers.
“This proposed transaction underscores our commitment to providing secure, end-to-end solutions that protect our customers’ most valuable data and navigate the shifting landscape of data security and compliance.” Steve Fisher, President and GM, Einstein 1 Platform and Unified Data Services, Salesforce
Acquisitions of this size are always a big event in the Salesforce ecosystem, and not always for the right reasons. Here are four key takeaways and questions I have for the future.
1. Valuations Are Down
As some of you will have noticed, Salesforce acquired Own Company at a 43% discount to their previous valuation of $3.35B. Since the days of the post-pandemic technology boom, SaaS valuations and multiples are coming down significantly, and without a viable road to IPO at the moment, we are truly in a buyer’s market (as we coincidentally covered in our Salesforce M&A trends post this week).
2. Next-Gen Acquisition Spree
Roll back the clock a few years, and Salesforce acquisition sprees were commonplace. They built out their entire land and expand, Customer 360 product strategy through acquisitions, with some of the most significant including Tableau, Mulesoft, Demandware, and Exact Target.
But with the buyer’s market, lower valuations, and Salesforce needing to boost growth to fend off some of their fastest growing competitors, could we see another acquisition spree that will spawn the next generation of Apps that will support Salesforce’s future growth?
Salesforce has a lot of cash on hand with their renewed focus on profitability over growth at all costs, and there are any number of AppExchange companies that could be acquired to fill gaps in the current platform.
Just as Salesforce has attempted to launch its own Backup and Restore solution over the years, they’ve ultimately decided to buy Own company instead of fighting them. Maybe we will see something similar with DevOps – Salesforce released DevOps Centre a couple of years ago but is ultimately being beaten by the likes of Copado, Gearset, AutoRabit, and Flosum.
Other app categories that are growing fast and Salesforce may look to acquire could include
RevOps leaders including Clari, documents and contracts businesses such as Conga, or change intelligence platforms like Elements.Cloud, to support the growing complexity of Salesforce Orgs.
3. Inevitable Disruption
As with any acquisition that Salesforce makes, it’s always going to cause disruption with competitors and how they seek to compete against their biggest partner.
One of the biggest examples of this was when Salesforce acquired CPQ provider Steelbrick back in 2015 for $360M. At the time, Apttus were their biggest competitor, and as I’m sure many would remember, were very prominent throughout the industry at this time. Overnight, this changed their trajectory from a hypergrowth startup to a business in limbo.
Although Apttus claimed to be doing just fine with a $1B valuation, they later merged with Conga in a deal worth $715M, where they also dropped the Apttus brand.
Backup is a huge business in the Salesforce ecosystem. Other standalone platforms such as Odaseva have a slightly different USP to many, and most DevOps platforms such as those listed above also have some kind of backup and archiving functionality. However, I would imagine customers of these providers would prefer to have DevOps and Backup on the same platform in many instances.
4. How Will Salesforce Integrate Own?
The acquisition of Own seems like a smart move for Salesforce. Their rocketship growth over the past decade has netted them a decent market share for Backup in the Salesforce ecosystem. With the resources of Salesforce behind them, as well as the “stamp of approval”, Own could become a catalyst for growth. But is there a deeper meaning behind the acquisition that we are yet to see?
Own’s latest product launch involves analyzing historical data, in order to identify trends, make informed decisions, and improve forecast accuracy. A topic they discussed on our website just this week.
Own arguably has more data on certain customers than Salesforce holds, due to their archiving solution that migrates data away from your Salesforce Org to free up space.
So in the age of AI where information is king, could we see Own’s purpose be destined for something bigger behind backup and archiving?
Summary
There is no doubt that we’ll hear a lot more about the Own Company acquisition over the coming weeks with the Dreamforce circus rolling into town. For Salesforce, this is a smart move to acquire one of their champion startups who operate in a space that is becoming more relevant with the rise of AI, cybersecurity, and data.
For the ecosystem, this could shake up competition, and we may see reactions in the form of more acquisitions, partnerships, and announcements.
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