Salesforce continues its shopping fling by acquiring DimDim, a web conferencing service for $31 million in cash. In the last month this is the third public acquisition by Salesforce after email contact manager, Etacts and Heroku for $212 million in cash.
DimDim raised $9 million in venture funding. It provides a platform for browser-based web conferencing, which is based on an open source platform as there is no requirement for the installation of any desktop software for it. Real-time collaboration capabilities are provided by the platform, also the ability to record sessions, share documents, phone conferencing and whiteboard and use video.
Salesforce’s official website, salesforce.com reads that DimDim’s real-time communication technologies will be used by Salesforce in its social collaboration platform. CRM had refused the comparisons of Chatter with Facebook. But Salesforce said that the amalgamation of Chatter and DimDim will project Facebook’s proved theory of an integrated service of collaboration and communication.
The release read,
Today, Facebook has proven the value of integrated collaboration and communication, with services like presence and messaging, which helped fuel user adoption, making it the world’s most popular Internet site. Salesforce.com followed a similar path when it introduced the Salesforce Chatter collaboration platform. Today, more than 60,000 customers have deployed Chatter since its release in June — making it the company’s most-popular product. Now with Dimdim, salesforce.com is following Facebook’s lead once again. By offering an integrated collaboration and communication platform, the company believes it will drive greater Chatter adoption, increase customer loyalty and differentiate its entire product portfolio.
Thus, it seems Salesforce will combine the ability to carry out web conferences and also share screens to Chatter to make it a communication platform. It is eager to create the Facebook. Incorporation of features like voice calling, real-time chat and many more will help Chatter to become more like Facebook.