Salesforce completes Radian6 acquisition

Salesforce.com has finalised its acquisition of social media monitor Radian6, having bought the Canadian company for a cool 172 million in March this year. The purchase forms part of the company's strategy to focus on business cloud computing integration with social media to take advantage of the "incredible adoption" rates currently taking place. Radian6, founded in 2006, specialises in technology to monitor sites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. It aims to gather market information to help organisations better position their products and services. "Radian6 adds huge value to salesforce.com by delivering the public, social web across all our products," said Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive of Salesforce.com."Giving customers the social intelligence they want with the business context they need will further differentiate our products and accelerate our growth."The acquisition is the latest in a line of acquisitions by Salesforce.com. It purchased Heroku at the end of last year, followed at the beginning of this year by the acquisition of cloud communications company DimDim. At the time DimDim was acquired Benioff described how Facebook had "fundamentally changed the way we communicate in our personal lives." It would seem buying up Radian6 falls in line with his goal of bringing social networking into the heart of business.In taking on Radian6, Salesforce.com is also taking on a collection of more than 2,400 of its existing corporate customers already using the technology, including Dell, Kodak, Pepsi, and UPS.