Salesforce Dreams of Being Microsoft or Oracle
Its acquisition of Tableau Software shows ambition can be expensive and risky.
Marc Benioff isn't afraid to splurge to make his company a software supermarket.
Photographer: Victor J. Blue/BloombergSalesforce.com Inc.’s latest acquisition shows yet again that Marc Benioff’s company has the ambition to become a more sprawling software superpower and is willing to pay a steep price to get there.
The company announced on Monday a deal to buy Tableau Software Inc. in a stock swap that values the younger software firm at $15.3 billion. Tableau’s software allows companies or their employees to wrangle data about their businesses, make sense of it through charts or other visuals and then use the information to make better decisions. This is a growing area of business software, with Microsoft Corp., Google and others all trying their hand at what is broadly called business intelligence.