Salesforce to acquire Israeli company ClickSoftware for $1.35b.
The acquisition – Salesforce's sixth and largest purchase of an Israeli company to date – is expected to close by October 31, subject to antitrust clearance in the United States and Israel.
By EYTAN HALONThe company logo for Salesforce.com is displayed on the Salesforce Tower in New York City, U.S., March 7, 2019(photo credit: REUTERS/BRENDAN MCDERMID)
American cloud technology giant Salesforce has agreed to acquire Israeli-founded field service management company ClickSoftware Technologies for $1.35 billion.ClickSoftware, founded by Moshe Ben-Bassat in Givat Shmuel in 1997, has been owned by American private equity firm Francisco Partners since 2015. Salesforce says the acquisition will enhance its Service Cloud customer relationship management (CRM) platform for customer service and support.The acquisition – Salesforce's largest purchase of an Israeli company to date – is expected to close by October 31, subject to antitrust clearance in the United States and Israel."At Salesforce, we introduced our Field Service Lightning product in 2016 in close collaboration with ClickSoftware for our customers to manage field service," Elad Donsky, Salesforce vice-president of engineering and head of Israel R&D, told The Jerusalem Post."The product became very successful with our customers and the business is growing really fast. We decided recently that we want to work on this product together, listen to our customers and actually acquire Click, the leading company in providing field service tools."ClickSoftware's 700-strong workforce, including approximately 200 employees at its Petah Tikva office, serve over 15,000 customers from a wide range of industries, including leading brands Bosch, Deutsche Telecom, Ericsson and Unisys. The acquisition of the company will increase Salesforce's existing Israel workforce to more than 600 employees."Our mission has been clear since the beginning – to be the global leader in field service management and deliver significant value to our customers," said ClickSoftware CEO Mark Cattini. "Joining Salesforce provides a tremendous opportunity to accelerate this vision."As a part of Salesforce, we will be able to innovate faster, enabling our joint customers to deliver even better experiences to their customers. This is an exciting milestone, and I look forward to what we’ll deliver to our respective customers as one company after close."ClickSoftware will be the sixth Israeli company acquired by Salesforce since it first entered the Israeli market in 2011. Previous acquisitions include AI-powered marketing intelligence platform Datorama for approximately $850 million in July 2018 and conversational intelligence platform Bonobo for a reported $40m.-$50m in May 2019.Salesforce also has a strong R&D presence in Israel and has announced investments in 12 local companies to date. It is expected to further widen its investment portfolio in Israel after Salesforce Ventures, the company’s venture arm, launched a $125m. fund to back enterprise cloud start-ups in Europe, the Middle East and Africa."This year, we announced that Israel will be a strategic, growing R&D hub that will provide innovative products to the company," said Donsky. "We'll continue to grow in the next few years and be very active in Israel. We're just increasing our investment in the region."Last week, Salesforce announced that it had completed its mega-acquisition of Seattle-based self-service analytics platform Tableau Software for $15.7b.
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