Confirmed: Microsoft Not Interested in Buying SalesForce
Just last week, rumors began circulating about the possible sale of SalesForce. Sources such as the Seattle Times confirmed that the company had retained the services of a banking firm, potentially to negotiate the sale of the company.
As the week progressed, it became clear that SalesForce was on the selling block. CloudWedge recently wrote a report speculating on which companies could be a good fit to take over the SalesForce brand. We speculated that the top three most likely candidates to take over SalesForce would be Oracle, IBM and Apple.
According to a report by Reuters, reporter Nadia Damouni saysthat she has talked to sources within Microsoft and that it has been confirmed that Microsoft will not bid on SalesForce. Other blogs speculated that Microsoft would be the frontrunner for the purchase of SalesForce.
In some ways, that makes sense, considering Microsoft has the checkbook to make $50B acquisitions. In other ways, many of the things SalesForce does is duplicative to what Microsoft already does. That’s never stopped acquisitions from happening in the past, it’s just a mere observation on our part.
The Reuters story went on to say that the reporters confidential sources mentioned that they thought the $50B valuation for SalesForce was “Expensive.”
The Reuters report quoted the confidential source as saying, “Salesforce’s cloud computing software was becoming commoditized.”
Safra Catz from Oracle chimed on the rumors of Microsoft potentially buying SalesForce saying, “It would cause a lot of disruption in that market and so I would view that as something that would be helpful to us, especially in the short or medium term, dependent on who it was.”
Although Oracle has been candid about other companies buying out SalesForce, Oracle has declined to comment on its own intentions as to whether or not they will decide to announce a bid on SalesForce.
