Salesforce.com Acquires Dimdim

Salesforce.com last week completed its acquisition of Dimdim for approximately $31 million in cash.

Dimdim was founded in 2007 and has since created real-time communication technologies, such as presence, messaging, and screen sharing. Salesfoce.com will gain Dimdim's real-time communication technologies and a team of developers experienced in building cloud-based collaboration services. Salesforce.com will use the acquisition to bring new real-time communication capabilities to the Chatter collaboration platform, mimicking the Facebook model of combining collaboration and communication into an integrated service.

"Facebook has fundamentally changed the way we communicate in our personal lives” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, in a statement. He added that the acquisition of Dimdim "will help salesforce.com deliver to the enterprise the same integrated collaboration and communication experience that made Facebook the world's most popular Internet site."

"From our start, Dimdim has focused on enabling real-time communication in the cloud, with no software," said D.D. Ganguly, CEO of Dimdim, in a statement. "Salesforce.com gives us the opportunity to apply our expertise and align our vision of real-time, social enterprise software in the cloud at a scale that wouldn't have been otherwise possible."

Salesforce.com admits to following Facebook’s lead when introducing the Salesforce Chatter collaboration platform. Chatter is the company’s most popular product with more than 60,000 customers having deployed Chatter since its release in June 2010.

Dimdim was founded by Ganguly and Prakash Khot with a focus on creating enterprise applications on a cloud-based communications platform. Dimdim’s current offerings allow users to host or attend live online meetings, demos, and webinars using a Web browser. Dimdim has offices in Lowell, Mass., and Hyderabad, India.