Founded in 2010, Nova Scotia, Canada-based GoInstant provides Web customer experience services, most notably with a tech offering that enables real-time customer and social channel interaction and sharing inside and outside an enterprise firewall. In a blog announcing the deal, Salesforce.com indicated it was committed to continuing investment and development of GoInstant’s “technology and team.”
Earlier Monday, Salesforce.com spokespeople declined to comment on a Wall Street Journal report that the CRM vendor had bought GoInstant for $70 million. There were no financial details disclosed by either company in the official announcement Monday afternoon.
During a rash of spring deals in the customer experience and social marketing areas including purchases by Microsoft and Oracle, last month Salesforce.com purchased marketing vendor Buddy Media for $689 million in cash and stock.
It’s also been a tumultuous few weeks at Salesforce.com. In late June, the vendor suffered a hardware failure that knocked out service to many North American customers for up to six hours. On the positive side, business publisher Forbes ranked Salesforce at the top of its annual list of “most innovative companies,” beating out leaders in other industries such as Nintendo and Starbucks as well as fellow on-demand vendors Google and Amazon (which ranked second).
Justin Kern is senior editor at Information Management and can be reached at justin.kern@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @IMJustinKern.
