After making it big in the cloud computing business,
Salesforce.com
(
CRM
) recently shifted its focus to the social networking domain and
allied with Twitter. As per the alliance, Twitter will provide its
entire volume of public Tweets to Salesforce Radian6 customers.
The alliance is expected to help its enterprise customers
analyze around 400 million Tweets generated daily, thus enhancing
their decision-making process.
This alliance will help in processing the social conversations
covering their products, brand and industry that facilitate
effective business decision-making, which in turn will strengthen
the company's customer relationships. Customer behavior analysis
has emerged as an important requirement in today's business world
and this collaboration is expected to cater to that need.
We believe that this is a natural progression for the company
after it acquired Canada-based social analytics company Radian6 for
$326 million in March last year. Radian6 has been successful in
offering cloud-based services to companies, which help them to
monitor users' comments about their products on
Facebook
(
FB
), Twitter, YouTube and
LinkedIn
(
LNKD
), and other such social platforms.
Salesforce is always on the look out for technical collaboration
or strategic alliances with different companies. A couple of weeks
back, Salesforce entered into a fresh agreement with
Accenture plc
(
ACN
), which will help to strengthen its long-standing relationship
with the IT company. The combined capabilities of both Salesforce
and Accenture resulted in a number of management-oriented solutions
that have helped organizations to achieve business excellence and
cost optimization in the areas of customer service and support,
sales force automation, and supply chain and human resources
management.
Moreover, the recent acquisition of Buddy Media for
approximately $689 million is another prudent move on the company's
part. Though this deal may temporarily result in lower margins and
profit for the company, it will help Salesforce to tighten its grip
in the social enterprise area, which is attracting the attention of
major business enterprises across the globe.
We see continuous product launches and deal wins as positives.
However, low-margin government deals, foreign exchange fluctuations
and stiff competition from key players such as
IBM Corp.
(
IBM
) and
Hewlett-Packard Company
(
HPQ
) may challenge the growth prospects of the company to a certain
extent.
Currently, Accenture has a short-term Hold rating, denoted by
the Zacks #3 Rank.
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