Salesforce is buying data visualisation company Tableau in a $15.7 billion all-share deal, their biggest acquisition ever. This comes on the heels of Google acquiring analytics startup Looker last week for $2.6 billion suggesting that there's big appetite to make sense of all this big data everyone speaks of.
Tableau will receive about 1100 Salesforce A shares in the deal, equaling $15.7 billion based on Salesforce's share price on Friday. That's a really good deal for Tableau considering that it had a market capitalisation that valued it at $10.8 billion before Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff came knocking on their door.
The Seattle based data visualisation company will keep its chief executive, Adam Selipsky and most importantly its brand. Salesforce, contrary to popular belief is actually based in San Franscisco. According to Marc Benioff, this marriage brings together the world's number one CRM with the world's number one analytics platform.
"Tableau helps people see and understand data and Salesforce helps people engage and understand customers" said Marc Benioff in a statement. Tableau and Looker deals are big signs that technology companies are betting big on the big data race to the top. What are Microsoft and Apple up to?