Salesforce is buying its way into a bigger fight
For a company that put the brakes on acquisitions just a few years ago in the face of activist investor pressure, Salesforce has been pretty busy lately making deals. Since the beginning of 2025, it has announced plans to buy 18 companies. That's a lot of M&A action.
The latest is this week's proposed $5.7 billion purchase of customer engagement platform Braze, bringing the disclosed value of its acquisitions over that period to approximately $22 billion. And that doesn't include several deals where the price wasn't disclosed.
While the Braze deal has clear cross-over with what Salesforce is doing already, it's fair to ask just what Salesforce is up to with all these acquisitions. Let's start by looking at the companies that the CRM giant has scooped up recently.
It's quite a range, but the focus clearly is on agents and improving its AI position in the marketplace, a point I made in a June FastForward article when I noticed an uptick in the company's acquisitions. My theory at the time was that it was to fill in the agentic holes in the platform faster by using the power of its checkbook, a tried and true strategy for any large company. See ServiceNow, Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon -- need I go on?
As I thought about this piece though, I looked at the company's most recent earnings report and something stuck out to me. While they reported over $11 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 11 percent YoY, roughly 4.5 percentage points of that growth came from Informatica, meaning if you subtracted that, we would be talking single-digit growth, a very different story.
That got me thinking that perhaps the reason for buying all these companies was good old-fashioned growth hacking. If you can't get there organically, spend some money to give your growth a boost.
Yet there are several reasons for going the acquisition route including filling in platform holes, buying talent (a big reason these days when AI talent is so scarce) or chasing growth. But as Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller told me recently, it's hard to judge the entire acquisition package as a single strategy. "You really have to judge from acquisition to acquisition. It makes a difference," he said.
And now for something completely different
Jason Andersen, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, has a different idea. As he told me recently, revenue isn't going to be a big needle mover for a number of these acquisitions, and while talent is a good reason, it's not the only one.
He thinks this is more about a platform shift to position the company to compete better with both the big AI labs and more traditional competitors. "But the real thing is that Salesforce is doing everything it can to be seen as a platform for customer interactions via a set of business apps," Andersen told me.
And more importantly in his view, "They are repositioning to compete more effectively with AI players and unicorns. By rushing a stronger breadth play, they mitigate the threat of AI natives while setting up plays to take on Microsoft and Google."
Maybe Mueller is right and every acquisition has its own logic. But Andersen could be onto something too. The question is whether all these acquisitions will add up to something that can compete on that level. Buying its way into that fight is one thing. Winning it is another.
~Ron
