Salesforce.com Buys Jigsaw and Enters Cloud Data Services Market

Salesforce.com has agreed to acquire Jigsaw, which bills itself as "the world's largest database of up-to-date, downloadable, and complete contact information," in a move that sees it enter the $3 billion data services market. Jigsaw is a cloud-based sales and lead generation tool with a database of 20 million people spread across 4 million companies that has been built by crowdsourcing from 1.2 million members.

According to the Salesforce.com press release:

Jigsaw’s unique Wikipedia-style crowd-sourcing model delivers the world’s most complete, accurate and up-to-date business contact data. Since Jigsaw’s offering is delivered in the cloud, companies can focus on realizing success instead of focusing on legacy enterprise data management models that require expensive integration and continuous, dedicated maintenance. The acquisition will combine the power of salesforce.com’s suite of CRM applications and leading enterprise cloud platform with Jigsaw’s cloud-based model for the automation of acquiring, completing and cleansing business contact data. Jigsaw’s data cloud platform also creates an enormous opportunity for developers and independent software vendors to deliver entirely new applications that leverage the business contact data found in Jigsaw.

Jeff Nolan, a former venture capitalist and software exec, had this to say in his post on Enterprise Irregulars:

First, now we know what Salesforce is doing with the $500 million in debt that they raised back in January...Lastly, this is an interesting acquisition because it puts Salesforce in competition with data service providers who would have previously considered themselves strong allies of Salesforce, namely D&B and Hoovers, both offering applications on AppExchange...To some degree this also puts Salesforce.com on a competitive intersection with LinkedIn, both companies now offering the ability to build an organizational chart for a target organization (aka sales prospect).

It's an interesting move because there is a natural fit between CRM and data services such as a database of contacts with lead nurturing and lead generation directly tied into it. It will be equally interesting to see how Salesforce.com's partnerships with the likes of Hoovers evolves.