Competition is heating up in the enterprise - Salesforce vs. Microsoft

As a Salesforce partner I am always interested to see what Benioff is up to. Suffice it to say - he's been busy.

Above is a selection of the recent acquisitions that Salesforce has performed. It reflects how busy the M&A team is and also what is coming from Salesforce.

Three things jump out at me about this list of acquisitions (as well as a few not on this list).

1. Salesforce continues to invest in its platform and CRM plumbing - technologies from BeyondCore, Implisit, Coolan, MetaMind, and PredictionIO seem well positioned to further embed Salesforce as the CRM plumbing of businesses everywhere. these are IP buys, not revenue buys, and that's ok.
2. Salesforce continues to buy business applications and workflow automation - DemandWare ($2.8b) and Steelbrick ($360m) are the two most recent. Demandware is an eCommerce company and Steelbrick speeds the process of configuring, pricing, and quoting products. This is more than plumbing - this is where business users work.
3. Salesforce also wants to be an office productivity suite - acquisitions from RelateIQ and Quip speak to this. While you may well have never heard of either one - this cost ~$1.1b. RelateIQ helps with email management, most of the press from Salesforce seems to focus on the mobile although it isn't always easy to tell. Quip is a new take on word processing. This means Salesforce is serious about day to day office productivity.

#3 is fascinating to me. $1b is a lot of money. 2% of the Salesforce market cap. Meanwhile, RelateIQ and Quip's revenue represents nothing more than a rounding error for Salesforce. This is where the competition with Microsoft comes in.

Now. Benioff loves to make joint press with Satya from Microsoft. Of course, he's does the same with Larry Ellison. But Microsoft is very quickly becoming a rival if not the rival for Salesforce. Consider the following:

• Microsoft still cashes lots of checks on the Office Productivity Suite, Salesforce acquired Quip for $750m
• Microsoft bought Acompli for $200m, Salesforce bought RelateIQ for email management,
• Microsoft is making huge investments in Azure, Salesforce continues to invest in Force.com
• Microsoft views Dynamics as an opportunity for growth, Salesforce is Salesforce
• Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.2b, Salesforce tried to
• Microsoft tried to buy Salesforce. GULP. Satya wouldn't pay the $70m that Marc wanted.

Surely there are more examples. But these are more than enough to illustrate the point.

This is going to be fun to watch.