Salesforce has agreed to acquire New York-based social marketing company Buddy Media for $689 million in cash and equity. As we wrote last week, an acquisition made sense for Buddy following Facebook’s bungled IPO–though it’s worth acknowledging that deals like this take time, and machinations for the acquisition were probably in the works long before the IPO.
“I’m excited to announce that we’ve entered into an agreement to acquire Buddy Media,” Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s chairman and CEO, said on an investor call this morning. “It’s our largest acquisition to date at Salesforce.com. We’re expecting the deal to close in our third fiscal quarter.”
Mr. Benioff said that the deal would allow Salesforce to “double down” on its marketing cloud, and that the purchase of Buddy, coupled with its prior acquisition of social media monitoring platform Radian6, “will help us capture more of this growing market and accelerate our growth.”
Salesforce plans to keep on all of Buddy Media’s 300 employees, including its founders Michael and Kass Lazerow. “We have a great track record of successfully retaining and elevating great leaders from prior acquisitions,” said Salesforce’s CFO Graham Smith.
The acquisition is the largest one in the New York City tech scene in five years. To give you some perspective on that $689 million, AOL acquired the Huffington Post for $315 million, or less than half the amount, in 2011.
“Buddy Media plans to continue to innovate and build new product,” wrote Mr. Lazerow in a blog post following the deal close. “We plan to build our sales team like crazy. And we plan to continue our global rollout, which is just starting.”
