Salesforce the cloud computing company just put their stake in the ground with their acquisition of the Canadian social media monitoring company Radian6 for $325 million in cash and stock. Radian6 was founded in 2006 with a focus on helping companies listen to the social web. Radian6 monitors conversations across the social web including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and online communities to provide insight and perspective to clients who seek a better understanding of what is being said about them online as they engage more and more in the rapids of the real-time river.
Radian6’s clients include Pepsi, The American Red Cross, Adobe, Canadian Tire among many others. According to Radian6 they work with over half of the Fortune 100 companies and is used by many on the agency side as well.
Salesforce headquartered in San Francisco, California is most known for it’s customer relationship management products run on the cloud that power how businesses interact with customers and find new ones across the globe. The agreement means an integration of Radian6 into the Salesforce platform to combine social media monitoring with the Salesforce platform.
According to Marcel LeBurn the CEO of Radian6 on their blog Radian6 will continue to operate as an independent company. Their first user conference Social2011 is coming up and the future looks bright as Salesforce and Radian6 begin this new era of collaboration.
This follows the explosion of social media monitoring solutions that have proliferated in recent years. I expect that integrating Radian6 and Salesforce is well underway and may be announced or at least hinted at Radian6’s first every user conference taking place in Boston on April 6th and 7th. Now things get interesting.
Credit: Ad Age