Salesforce has reached an agreement to acquire Quip, a word processing, spreadsheet and collaboration platform, for approximately $582 million, not including Salesforce Ventures’ existing investment in Quip, according to recent SEC filings. The acquisition is a step toward the productivity suite business for Salesforce and a clear competitive move against Microsoft as the two companies vie for leadership in the cloud-based tech market.
Quip offers communication tools for its documents and spreadsheets that are designed to promote collaboration between team members. The tools enable B2B marketers to communicate, review and brainstorm ideas in a single location during the content production process.
“As part of Salesforce, we will be able to expand our service more quickly and reach millions of people all over the world — which has been our mission since day one,” said Bret Taylor, CEO of Quip, in a blog post about the acquisition. “[Also], we’ll be able to extend the Salesforce Customer Success Platform in powerful new ways with our next-generation productivity capabilities. The possibilities of mixing data, content and communication are amazing.”
This move to compete with Microsoft Office coincides with Microsoft’s recent announcements to evolve the company into a prominent player in the business tech space. This includes the company’s recent combination of its current CRM and ERP cloud solutions into one service to better serve its business clients and — more notably — the recent acquisition of LinkedIn for roughly $26 billion.
Salesforce has also been actively acquiring new technology for its cloud platform in 2016, focusing heavily on IT, E-commerce and predictive analytics. Some notable acquisitions include:
- PredictionIO, an open source machine learning server for creating predictive features, in February 2016;
- MetaMind, an automated image recognition software powered by artificial intelligence, in April 2016;
- Implisit, a predictive analytics solution for enhancing sales performance in May 2016;
- Demandware, an enterprise cloud commerce solutions provider, in June 2016; and
- Coolan, a crowdsourced analytics startup for predicting server failures and lower IT costs in July 2016.
