If anyone thought that Salesforce was putting its wallet away after buying Mulesoft for $6.5 billion and Tableau for $15.7 billion, they were sorely wrong: the customer relationship management (CRM) specialist added to its portolio further this week, agreeing to buy Field Service Management (FSM) vendor ClickSoftware for $1.35 billion.
FSM is a discrete market within the broader customer service and support software market, providing software that supports the dispatch of technicians to remote locations. ClickSoftware, rated a leader in Gartner’s magic quadrant, provides software to coordinate this work, inform technicians, perform analysis, etc.
It has a significant number of utility, telecoms and manufacturing customers, with Gartner estimating that its midsize and large organization users number over 650,000.
Like many such organisations in this kind of software space, is midway through moving clients to a cloud-based offering, which it released in 2015.
See also: MuleSoft Founder Ross Mason’s Five 2019 Technology Predictions
ClickSoftware CEO Mark Cattini said: Becoming part of Salesforce will provide a tremendous opportunity for us to innovate faster and make Field Service Management an even more critical and differentiated part of Salesforce’s strategy and business.
“By joining Salesforce, we will be able to further power mission-critical applications for global service leaders like Bosch, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, National Grid, PG&E and Unisys as well as offer a wider range of capabilities, and deliver improved efficiency, effectiveness and customer experiences to an even broader global audience.”
Rival IFS was among those also welcoming the agreement, with Marne Martin, president, IFS Service management tweeting: “One less FSM competitor as Salesforce tries to buy their way to the leaders quadrant.”
She added in an emailed comment: “Salesforce’s acquisition of ClickSoftware leaves just IFS and Salesforce as the leading players in the global FSM market.
“It will be interesting to see how customers respond. There are a large number of organisations out there – especially those which are not Salesforce CRM customers – which want to integrate the best field service, presenting a significant market opportunity. The acquisition is testament to the acceleration of the FSM market. ”
Oracle, also a leader in Gartner’s magic quadrant for FSM with its Oracle Field Service Cloud (OFSC) may disagree with that assessment…
Salesforce reported Q1 revenue of $3.74 Billion, up 24 percent year-on-year, with operating cash flow of almost $2 billion, up 34 percent.
