Salesforce to Buy Ecommerce Platform Provider Demandware for $2.8B

CRM giant Salesforce last week announced plans to acquire ecommerce platform provider Demandware for $2.8 billion. The deal is expected to close by the end of July.

Demandware is the fifth most used ecommerce platform of the top 50,000 sites on the internet, according to a Hivemind analysis in April of 2015; Magento, Hybrid, IBM WebSphere, and ATG are the other four, in that order. Beats by Dre, Cole Haan, Columbia, Hugo Boss, Lacoste, New Balance, PacSun, Payless, Reebok, and Tory Burch are among the companies using Demandware technology, the Hivemind report indicates. The Demandware website also lists as customers Adidas, Burton, Callaway, Crocs, EMU Australia, Godiva, Party City, Puma, and a lengthy list of other well-known brands.

This Salesforce acquisition will enable it to offer its analytics, communities, IoT, marketing, platform, sales, and service solutions to the broad Demandware customer base. It will also help Salesforce to add a new arrow to its quiver in terms of product portfolio.

"With Demandware, Salesforce will be well positioned to deliver the future of commerce as part of our Customer Success Platform and create yet another billion-dollar cloud," said Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff.

Worldwide spending on digital commerce platforms is forecast to grow more than 14 percent annually, reaching $8.544 billion by 2020, according to Gartner.

Salesforce is already the leader in the increasingly crowded CRM arena, for which total worldwide sales of software exceeded $23 billion in 2014, a 13 percent increase over the previous year, Gartner has reported.

In fact, Salesforce last year said it was the sixth largest software company of any kind and the fastest growing top 10 software company in the world. Over the last 17 years, Salesforce has expanded and redefined CRM, bringing social, mobile, data science and IoT technologies to its cloud platform.