GUEST-BLOG: Salesforce.com on a Spending Spree?

By Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal, Beagle Research Group. Salesforce.com is raising $500 million so that it can go on a buying spree. First things first: Why borrow half a billion when you've already got over a billion in cash and marketable securities on your balance sheet? The question answers itself: You borrow when you can get money at attractive rates and the best time to be a borrower is when you're in a financial position secure enough to walk away from a middling deal. In my humble opinion, the company's borrowing the money simply because it can — and because coming out of a recession is a nice time to pick up some bargains. A "bargain" here would be an emerging company with innovative intellectual property and a weak balance sheet. First, I'd buy technologies that enable a company to substitute social awareness for transportation. Then I'd look at the community side of social media. CRM has been chasing outbound social media with the ardor of a superannuated sophomore — with similarly mixed results. It’s been a one-way street so far and, frankly, I'm not sure if outbound social media companies know how to dance with CRM in the first place. Then there’s video, Voice over Internet Protocol, and audio. These technologies offer some great opportunities to CRM but they have to scale and come down a big learning curve — pronto. CRM has to have a native facility for making three-to-five-minute videos on the desktop — with or without people, but with narration and other audio effects. [Editors' Note: For more on the current state of video technologies in CRM, see Associate Editor Jessica Tsai's December 2009 feature, "Video Is More Than Viral."] As part of the foray into video, we should include a company or technology that supports Web-based meetings. Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal of CRM market research firm and consultancy Beagle Research Group, has been writing about CRM since January 2000, and was the first analyst to specialize in on-demand computing. His 2004 white paper, “The New Garage,” laid out the blueprint for cloud computing. A CRM magazine columnist, he often guest-blogs with us at destinationCRMblog.com, but his own blog can be found here. (His Reality Check column on Marc Benioff appears in CRM’s November 2009 special issue on Salesforce.com.) He can be reached at denis@beagleresearch.com, or on Twitter (@denispombriant).