Acquisition News: Salesforce.com, Google, Oracle, EMC

There's been a bit of acquisition news lately with Salesforce.com and Oracle buying social media intelligence, EMC aquiring performance management and Google gaining productivity software.

Salesforce.com to acquire Buddy Media. Salesforce.com (CRM) announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire social media marketing platform Buddy Media, for approximately $689 million payable in cash and salesforce.com equity. The Buddy Media platform allows customers to publish content, place and optimize social advertising and measure the effectiveness of social media marketing programs. The comprehensive Marketing Cloud will combine products and allow customers to listen, engage, gain insight, publish, advertise and measure social marketing programs. “Salesforce.com now has the number one players in social listening and marketing – Radian6 and Buddy Media,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “With CMOs surpassing CIOs in spend on technology within the next five years, our Marketing Cloud leadership will allow us to capitalize on this massive opportunity.”

Oracle acquires Collective Intellect. Oracle (ORCL) announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Collective Intellect. Collective Intellect’s cloud-based social intelligence solutions enable organizations to monitor, understand and respond to consumers’ conversations on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. It will be integrated with Oracle's Software as a Service and Social Platform, allowing companies to build more effective brands using the Internet and social media. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. “Gaining intelligence from consumer conversations across social media, and knowing customers’ intentions and interests helps organizations create better products and deliver better service,” said Thomas Kurian, executive vice president, Oracle Development. “Collective Intellect’s leading cloud-based applications for social media monitoring, combined with Oracle’s social relationship platform offers a complete social experience to our customers.”

EMC acquires Watch4net. EMC announced that it has acquired Montreal-based Watch4net, a privately-held provider of enterprise and carrier-class performance management software that provides real-time, historical and projected visibility into network, data center and cloud infrastructure performance. Watch4net has worked closely with EMC over the last seven years to deliver proven, enterprise and carrier-class solutions to meet customers' IT management needs. Already tightly integrated with IT Operations Intelligence Suite today, Watch4net leverages EMC's topology awareness, instrumentation and management console. "Today's rapidly-growing and dynamic IT infrastructures carry an ever-looming mandate to stay on top of absolutely everything happening within them," said Jay Mastaj, Senior Vice President and General Manager, EMC Infrastructure Management Group.  "Regardless of where customers are along their journey to cloud computing, insight into every aspect of IT performance and the ability to manage it without growing staff and with increasing granularity, are no longer optional. By bringing Watch4net into the EMC portfolio and roadmap, EMC rounds out its world-class IT management solution to address customers' most critical IT management needs across their physical and virtual IT environments."

Google acquires Quickoffice.  On Google's official blog, Engineering Director Alan Warren announced that Google has acquired productivity software provider Quickoffice. Quickoffice has iPhone, Android and Symbian office suites that allow creation and editing of all Microsoft Office document, spreadsheet and presentation formats. Co-founder and CEO of Quickoffice Alan Masarek talks about the journey the company has taken and vision for the future with Google in a recent blog post.