Salesforce’s recent acquisition of Informatica highlights the company’s long strategy to expand far beyond its core CRM platform. This acquisition is a strategic move by Salesforce to enhance its capabilities in data management.
Over the years, Salesforce’s strategic acquisitions have significantly broadened its product offerings, creating an ecosystem that spans across multiple clouds, solutions and business areas.
In this article, I explore how these acquisitions have enhanced Salesforce’s capabilities while also introducing complexities for CRM professionals who must integrate and manage these diverse technologies. I aim to highlight both the opportunities and challenges that come with Salesforce’s continuously evolving landscape.
Salesforce Clouds: Built on platform or separate technologies?
Salesforce’s clouds, such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud, serve different purposes. But not all of them are directly built on the core Salesforce platform. Some operate as distinct technologies. This differentiation comes largely from Salesforce’s acquisition strategy.
Over the years, the company has acquired various companies to quickly expand its capabilities into specialised domains. Some of its most notable acquisitions include ExactTarget (Marketing), Demandware (B2C e-Commerce), Cloudcraze (B2B e-commerce), Mulesoft (Integration), Tableau (Analytics) or Slack (Collaboration) for instance. They still operate largely as separate systems despite their integration within the Salesforce ecosystem.
For instance, Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud emerged from its acquisition of ExactTarget in 2013. ExactTarget was a company specialising in email marketing. It was originally built on the Microsoft .NET framework. The acquisition brought significant digital marketing capabilities to Salesforce alongside earlier acquisitions like Radian6. However, unlike native Salesforce offerings, Marketing Cloud still remains today a distinct technology with its own architecture.
Similarly, in the e-Commerce area, CloudCraze was initially developed on Salesforce’s Force.com platform while Demandware operated as an independent e-Commerce platform. Both platforms are now part of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, with CloudCraze focusing on B2B and Demandware (now called Salesforce B2C Commerce) serving B2C clients.
From a technical standpoint, technologies acquired by Salesforce might not always fully align with native Salesforce solutions. This affects how CRM professionals approach integration strategies or combine multiple clouds to ensure smooth data flow and process automation between clouds. Commerce Cloud webstores use Experience Cloud for the front-end shopping experience for instance.
The role of acquisitions in shaping Salesforce’s ecosystem
Salesforce’s acquisition of ExactTarget is a good example of how acquisitions have shaped the company’s broader ecosystem.
Back in 2011, I had the opportunity to work with ExactTarget as an integrator. Salesforce did offer campaign management functionalities at that time too. But ExactTarget was more advanced. And it was within the Salesforce ecosystem. We used ExactTarget to complement Salesforce marketing capabilities and create a comprehensive solution for our client.
ExactTarget’s acquisition by Salesforce marked a critical moment in Salesforce’s journey This deal was not only the largest at that time but also set the foundation for what we now know as Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud.
By acquiring ExactTarget, Salesforce expanded its own offering quite significantly in email marketing, social media, mobile marketing, and more. Today, Marketing Cloud continues to play an important role in the Salesforce’s ecosystem, offering marketing automation that can be integrated into other Salesforce clouds.
The acquisition shows Salesforce’s strategy of purchasing best-in-class tools, such as ExactTarget and Pardot, and later incorporating them into a broader cloud offering. Ultimately, these acquisitions have allowed Salesforce to really enhance its offering to what we know today. Oracle did the same in the early 2000.
Understanding the Salesforce ecosystem is essential for CRM professionals
Salesforce’s ecosystem of partners has also been a key element in this strategy. The AppExchange, Salesforce’s marketplace, has been central. It has allowed partners to build and market ready-to-install apps that address specific business needs, from analytics to AI-driven innovations. We have seen that Cloudcraze was built on the Force. com platform.
This collaboration between Salesforce and its partners has not only enhanced the platform with diverse tools and solutions but also accelerated time-to-market for many organisations. It also simplifies the management of technologies by leveraging (external) partner expertise.
Consulting partners have also played a critical role in the context. They have been helping client executives with strategic guidance and integration services to make the most of their investments in Salesforce.
For CRM professionals, understanding the difference between clouds that are built on the Salesforce platform and those that are not has been critical. It is also important to know what additional solution in the AppExhange could help address specific needs.
This directly impacts how integrations are implemented, how data is managed, and even how licensing is handled. For example, Salesforce clouds like Sales Cloud and Service Cloud are native to the Salesforce platform and can easily share data through common objects and data models. However, Marketing Cloud or Tableau require different integration approaches due to their distinct underlying technologies.
This distinction also influences licensing. Since non-native Salesforce clouds often operate independently, organisations might need to secure separate licenses or subscriptions, increasing the overall cost and complexity of the implementation.
For instance, integrating MuleSoft for API-driven connectivity between Salesforce and external systems might require not only a technical understanding of both platforms but also a separate subscription to MuleSoft’s Anypoint platform. Similarly, Tableau’s analytics capabilities are powerful, but they require a different licensing model compared to Salesforce’s native reporting features
The evolution of Salesforce’s ecosystem through acquisitions means that we — as CRM professionals — must stay up to date with new features and tools. As Salesforce continues to acquire companies to expand its capabilities in fields like AI, we must stay informed about which solutions are built natively within Salesforce and which operate separately. This helps in planning better integration strategies and choosing the right tools for specific business needs.
A personal perspective: A growing complexity
From my own experience working with Salesforce over many years, the company’s approach to acquisitions has transformed Salesforce from being a basic Sales Force Automation tool into the robust, multi-cloud platform it is today.
When I first started working with Salesforce, we mainly focused on its CRM capabilities for sales and service management. However, as acquisitions like ExactTarget, Pardot, and MuleSoft entered the picture, the landscape evolved significantly.
These acquisitions have brought both opportunities and complexities. On one hand, Salesforce offers a powerful set of tools that can handle everything from sales to marketing, data analytics, and AI-driven insights. On the other hand, companies need to be mindful of the added complexity and cost that come with integrating and maintaining these disparate systems.
Salesforce has done a tremendous work of continually improving these integrations over time. But, still, integrating systems that were not originally built to work together, especially in multi-cloud projects, can be tricky for those new to the ecosystem.
Many of my recent projects require not only working with end-to-end processes and across multiple Salesforce clouds but also ensuring a seamless integration with ERPs like SAP. I approach these projects from a business and process perspective first, which allows me to go above the technical considerations and address both the technical and business needs more effectively.
Conclusion
Salesforce’s product stack extends far beyond its original CRM platform, thanks in large part to its strategic acquisitions. For professionals working in CRM and Salesforce like myself, it is crucial to distinguish between clouds built on the Salesforce platform and those that aren’t. This difference has implications for how businesses approach integration, licensing, and overall system architecture.
While Salesforce’s acquisitions like ExactTarget, MuleSoft, Tableau or Informatica have expanded its capabilities, they also introduce a layer of complexity that we must address carefully.
Ultimately, Salesforce’s strength lies in its ability to provide a cohesive platform that can adapt to the changing needs of client organisations. Whether you are looking to enhance your marketing efforts with Marketing Cloud, build webstores with Commerce Cloud, integrate diverse data sources using MuleSoft, or drive deeper insights with Tableau, understanding the unique place of each tool in Salesforce’s ecosystem is key to ensure success.