Salesforce is at it again, only a few days after finalising their biggest deal ever – Tableau at $15.7 Billion. Late last night, Salesforce announced the acquisition of Israeli company ClickSoftware for £1.35B, an organisation that offers field service software.
This year is showing signs of 2016, the mega year that saw Salesforce acquire 12 different businesses, mostly in the AI & Machine Learning space. After the spree cooled down, we then saw Salesforce announce Einstein, their AI platform that would sit across all their products. This year, ClickSoftware is Salesforce’s 6th acquisition, and while there isn’t a trend such as 2016, Salesforce is clearly investing in their Field Service Offering. The acquisition of leading mapping AppExchange App MapAnything back in April was a clear sign of this, alongside Tableau that will surely sit across all Salesforce products to bolster Salesforce’s Einstein Analytics data visualisation offering.
ClickSoftware – Field Service Management
ClickSoftware has been around for many years, in fact, they were founded before Salesforce back in 1997. They were one of the first pioneers in the field service space, and actually coined the term “Service Chain Optimisation” in 1996.
Field Service Management software is used for mobile workforces to optimise the way jobs are provisioned and interacted with. Examples of this would be people such as plumbers, computer technicians, or couriers. The software will track information such as the individuals capacity, their location, and the jobs they are currently working on as well as the jobs they will work on in the future.
ClickSoftware has always been focussed on the optimisation of this process and shows such statistics as the below on their website…
The Acquisition
It is not yet known how Salesforce will use the ClickSoftware acquisition in order to bolster their Field Service offering, but its clear that this will make Salesforce a clear leader in this market. It is generally agreed in the market, as per this comparison on G2 Crowd, that ClickSoftware has a more mature offering that Field Service Lightning, which makes a lot of sense seeing as ClickSoftware has been one of the market leaders since their founding.
“Salesforce Field Service Lightning, built on Service Cloud, harnesses the latest in dispatching, mobile workforce empowerment and IoT technologies to empower companies to connect their entire service workforce on a single, centralized platform. With the combined capabilities of Field Service Lightning and ClickSoftware, Salesforce will be positioned to lead the way to the future of field service,” Salesforce said in a statement.