Salesforce buys into web conferencing

Salesforce has dished out US$31 million in cash to pick up fellow US firm Dimdim.

The company specialises in creating applications for cloud communication platforms and offers a free web-conferencing service.

By acquiring the relatively small firm, headquartered in Boston, Salesforce hopes to boost its Chatter social collaboration tool with the real-time technologies owned by Dimdim.

Comparing the capabilities to those of the world’s largest social network, Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive (CEO) of Salesforce, said: “Facebook has fundamentally changed the way we communicate in our personal lives.”

“The acquisition of Dimdim will help salesforce.com deliver to the enterprise the same integrated collaboration and communication experience that made Facebook the world’s most popular internet site.”

Although Dimdim will continue to run for its existing customers during the transition process, it has stopped taking new registrations until the deal is done.

“From our start, Dimdim has focused on enabling real-time communication in the cloud, with no software,” said DD Ganguly, CEO of Dimdim.

“Salesforce.com gives us the opportunity to apply our expertise and align our vision of real-time, social enterprise software in the cloud – at a scale that wouldn’t have been otherwise possible.”

This article originally appeared at itpro.co.uk