Salesforce buys Quip for $582 million

Salesforce has again decided to splash the cash in order to boost its portfolio this time with the acquisition of productivity software maker Quip.

The deal, which will be for $582 million in stock, will add to Salesforce’s portfolio a number of programs for creating documents and spreadsheets.

Quip’s products are designed for collaboration using mobile devices, something which should be a boost to the CRM vendor as it looks to advance its mobile offering.

Another angle to the deal is that Quip is a competitor of Microsoft Office and Alphabet’s Google Docs.

Salesforce has in place a “strategic partnership” with Microsoft in which there is a Salesforce integration in Outlook. It is perhaps unlikely that Salesforce would use the acquisition to take on Microsoft, instead it is probable that Quip will be used to enhance existing offerings.

For Quip the deal will see it be able to significantly expand its reach in the market. Bret Taylor, Quip founder, said: “As part of Salesforce, we will be able to expand our service more quickly and reach millions of people all over the world.”

Quip was founded in 2012 and its founder Bret Taylor previously helped co-create Google Maps and worked as chief technology officer at Facebook. The company has raised $46m in venture funding, according to VentureSource.

Quip said: “Salesforce and Quip share the same philosophy about software: it should be in the cloud, built for the mobile era, and be inherently social. Salesforce pioneered the shift to enterprise cloud computing—and Quip has been working since 2012 to re-imagine a productivity platform for teams that allows them to be more connected, more collaborative and get more work done.”

This is the third acquisition that Salesforce has made in the past two months. Although it missed out on LinkedIn it bought Demandware for $2.8bn at the start of June and Coolan on July 22^nd for an undisclosed fee.

Coolan will help Salesforce to build tools that track infrastructure reliability while the Demandware acquisition will boost the Salesforce Commerce Cloud.