In New Delhi: Salesforce.com has announced an agreement to acquire Jigsaw, the leader in crowd-sourced data services in the cloud. Jigsaw has developed Wikipedia-style crowd-sourcing model to obtain business contact data.
Salesforce will pay $142M cash purchase price, plus a performance-based contingent earn out of up to 10% of the purchase price.
The acquisition will mark salesforce.coms strategic entry into the $3 billion market for cloud-based business to business data services, and will create new opportunities for salesforce.com to partner with information services companies like D&B, Hoovers and LexisNexis. Jigsaws data cloud platform also creates an opportunity for developers and independent software vendors to deliver entirely new applications that leverage the business contact data found in Jigsaw.
Companies and professionals, whether or not already salesforce.com customers, can become members of the Jigsaw community by sharing common contact data that is found on a business card, including name, title, company, mailing address, business telephone number and e-mail address.
Any Jigsaw.com community member can access the database, and can accumulate points through helping to maintain data quality. These points may be redeemed for access to additional records. In addition, companies or professionals may utilize the Jigsaw service by purchasing contact data. Jigsaw also offers premium automated data cleansing services to update and enrich data critical to success for any CRM deployment for a subscription-based fee. Jigsaw sets the standard among business contact data service providers by allowing business professionals included in the database to easily edit their information, set their contact preferences or if they choose, opt out of the listing.
Salesforce.com is excited to bring the data services industry into the era of Cloud 2, said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. With Jigsaw, well make it as easy as Wikipedia to source data, as easy as iTunes to buy data and as easy as Facebook to stay updated as the data changes.
Companies are utilizing crowd-sourced data services in the cloud more than ever because it offers the best quality information, said Jim Fowler, CEO, Jigsaw. This is an exciting opportunity for all of us at Jigsaw, and will help us accelerate our ability to bring cloud-based data services to a wider audience.
"With the integrated Jigsaw and salesforce.com solution, companies will be able to better acquire and cleanse all business contact data. While Jigsaw will remain open to all CRM systems, current salesforce.com customers will find an integrated experience that includes an automated process for data cleansing. In addition, since Jigsaw products are already integrated with salesforce.com technologies, when Salesforce Chatter becomes generally available later this year, users will be able to receive real-time feeds when data changes or requires cleansing" Salesforce release said.
Jigsaws has a community of more than 1.2 million members. Over the last six years, community members have built and maintained a contact database of more than 21 million professionals at nearly 4 million companies. Jigsaw currently has 800 corporate customers like New Horizons Computer Learning Centers, Hackett Group and Sales Performance International.
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