Salesforce.com acquired Web conferencing platform Dimdim to obtain real-time communication capabilities as it continues to build out its Chatter collaboration platform in an apparent effort to match the Facebook social network.
Salesforce.com bought Indian
Web conferencing company Dimdim to add critical real-time communication
capabilities to its collaboration platform, the company said on Jan. 6.
Salesforce.com
paid $31 million in cash for the Dimdim acquisition, which closed today.
Dimdim
offers an "open core" Web conferencing program that doesn't require
the installation of any desktop software and is based on an open-source
platform. The product Salesforce.com is acquiring isn't actually open source,
although a community version of the product is available on SourceForge. The
browser-based Web conferencing platform provides real-time collaboration
capabilities, as well as the ability to share documents, record sessions and a whiteboard,
and use video, voice and phone conferencing. Dimdim "enables communication
in the cloud," according to its CEO,
D.D. Ganguly.
The
Web conferencing features will be
integrated
into Chatter, the enterprise social network platform, which Salesforce.com
announced in late 2009 and officially released in June 2010. More than 60,000
customers have deployed Chatter so far, Salesforce said.
The
company played up comparisons to Facebook while discussing the acquisition.
Dimdim will allow the company to add
communication
features to Chatter, "mirroring the proven Facebook model" of
offering collaboration and communication in an integrated service, the company
said. The company expects the integration to result in greater Chatter adoption
and increase customer loyalty.
Salesforce.com
wants to replicate in the software-as-a-service enterprise business application
field what Facebook has done for individual consumers: build a comprehensive
collaboration platform for sharing information and ideas.
"Facebook
has fundamentally changed the way we communicate in our personal lives," said
Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com.
The Dimdim acquisition will help Salesforce.com deliver the same integrated
experience to the enterprise, he said.
Dimdim
offers both free and paid plans on its Website. The paid plan allows for advanced
communications features not available in the free version or the open-source "community"
version. According to disgruntled Dimdim users on Twitter, account holders were
sent a terse five-line e-mail message Jan. 6 informing them of the acquisition
and that as a result their accounts would be closed.
Dimdim is not accepting any new customers and
will be shutting down the service for existing customers, according to the FAQ
on the site. Monthly accounts will expire on March 15, but annual accounts will
be available until the subscription plan ends, and no refunds will be issued,
the company said. All recordings and documents will be deleted once the
subscription expires, according to the FAQ.
Neither
Dimdim nor Salesforce.com plans to continue contributing to the open-source
project, according to the FAQ.
At
least one company, Fuze Meeting, took to Twitter to console the unhappy Dimdim
users lamenting the loss of a reliable and free Web conference tool and
encouraging them to check out Fuze Meeting's alternative service.
Salesforce.com
acquired six companies in 2010: Jigsaw, Sitemaster, Activa, Live Chat, Heroku
and Etacts. It
closed
the $212 million Heroku acquisition earlier this week. These deals reflect
the efforts of Salesforce.com, best known for its core customer relationship
management software, to expand a portfolio of business applications and
services.
With
Heroku, Salesforce.com can offer programming tools for applications on the
cloud. Salesforce.com also recently
unveiled
Database.com, which gives customers access to its platform's underlying
database infrastructure.
Dimdim
has offices in Lowell, Mass.,
and Hyderabad, India.
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