After two years of minimal big or small purchases, 2024 was the year of Salesforce’s most cohesive and mature mergers and acquisitions strategy so far.
Salesforce has a history of acquiring multiple companies a year, yet it rarely showed a clear pattern or strategy. That changed in 2024, showing Salesforce has reached a new level of maturity.
The lack of a clear strategy isn’t to say Salesforce made poor choices in acquisitions over the years. For example, the 2021 purchase of Slack demonstrated a clear move to becoming a unified platform, which required a collaboration engine. However, the vendor lacked a strategy or a foundation to fully support Slack and all the data it brought. 2024 saw a year of major data purchases, including data backup company Own and data protection and management vendor Zoomin.
Salesforce’s other acquisitions in 2024 were less data-focused, yet still add to the foundation the vendor continues to build for its unified platform, according to Liz Miller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. These buys were point-of-sale software vendor PredictSpring and AI voice agent developer Tenyx.
“Every single acquisition has a place and actually accelerates the move to making that architecture a reality. That was not always the Salesforce notion,” Miller said. “The Salesforce notion had always been, ‘Put the aspiration before the horse and the horse will chase the aspiration.’ Now … it’s, ‘Here is the North Star, and we’re going to keep shooting aspiration at that North Star.'”
All four Salesforce acquisitions in 2024 show how the vendor aims to have one core platform with a foundation of data and AI that acts as a shared service to functional areas of expertise, like sales and customer service. Own and Zoomin comprise this foundation and support the data that experiences from PredictSpring and Tenyx enable.
PredictSpring, in particular, bridges the gap between physical and digital experiences. For example, in-store associates could use this tool to check inventory, aid in showrooming, help style clients or automatically send digital coupons or offer personalized recommendations based on in-store purchases. On the other hand, Tenyx aids in the post-sale experience and enables Salesforce to embed more conversational AI and voice agents to its service offerings.
While 2024 was the year of data for Salesforce, 2025 is shaping up to be the year of content and knowledge, which Salesforce currently lacks in its playbook, according to Miller. Content management and generation, as well as knowledge management, are a much different beast to tackle than data. If Salesforce focuses on filling this gap in 2025, it will start a pattern of clear, intentional M&A strategies that move the needle in meaningful ways for its customers.
“They have the foundational building blocks for [knowledge], but they need to have a different way of thinking about it, and that’s going to be the challenge for Salesforce,” Miller said.
Michaela Goss is senior site editor for TechTarget’s Customer Experience and Content Management sites. She joined TechTarget as a writer and editor in 2018.
