Alex Dayon back on the choices that led to the acquisition of Salesforce.com Radian6and especially on how they intend to integrate the monitoring technology of social mediain their current and future offerings. It also confirms the importance of expressions ofcustomers in these digital spaces for all trades and industries, and thus justifies therelevance of such share repurchase. Alex also gives his opinion on the impact of thisacquisition on the market and its predictions of movements from other players like Google or Microsoft.
What were your motivations to choose Radian6?Radian6 is the industry’s leading social media monitoring platform used by more than half of the Fortune 100 to monitor, analyze and engage in social media conversations. Radian6’s unique technology monitors hundreds of millions of conversations every day across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and thousands of blogs and online communities, delivering actionable insight in real-time. Today, the company has more than 2,400 customers that include top global brands like AAA, Dell, GE, Kodak, Molson Coors, PepsiCo, and UPS.
Radian6’s products are helping company’s better market and sell to prospects, service customers and understand what’s being said about their brand, products, competitors and services. We also believe that the explosive growth of social media is just beginning, and with Radian6’s unmatched technology and visionary management team, the demand for their products will only continue to grow. Being a part of salesforce.com will help Radian6 scale its sales, development, support and marketing efforts to capitalize on this rapidly expanding market. In addition, we believe this acquisition will accelerate our growth.
What kind of moves did you expect from CRM and do you think that search vendors like Google or Microsoft could challenge you on this field?Salesforce.com understands that a massive shift is underway in the industry, the shift to Cloud 2. The first phase of cloud computing was about leveraging technologies that were low cost, fast and easy to use on your desktop. Cloud 2 represents the next generation of cloud computing, one that is inherently social, mobile and open.
With Radian6, salesforce.com accelerates the enterprise’s shift to Cloud 2, enhancing all of our products with the industry’s leading social media monitoring platform. Our customers are asking us for a way to capture the conversations happening on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and online communities, and tightly integrate them with their salesforce.com products. With the combination of salesforce.com and Radian6, companies will be able to bring the heart of the public social web into their business.
Can you predict market evolution for the Social Media Monitoring landscape for the 3 coming years?The social media monitoring landscape has a lot of potential as many businesses are just starting to tap into these platforms for brand building, customer service, and marketing. We cannot make any specific predictions about the industry, but know that it will continue to grow and evolve in response to the needs of business.
What integration option do you have planned for Radian6 and Salesforce technologies?Today, our customers are asking us for a way to capture these conversations, and tightly integrate them with their salesforce.com products. By acquiring Radian6, this will allow us to do just that, and more. For example:
- For Sales and Service Cloud customers, Radian6 will extend the value of their deployments by providing actionable social intelligence. We’ve already seen a number of examples of how social media is impacting the customer experience. Whether its disgruntled airline passengers airing complaints about broken baggage on YouTube, major car companies like Ford and Toyota directing advertising viewers to their Facebook fan pages instead of their websites, or companies like Dell unlocking new sales channels through Twitter campaigns, social media is where customers conversations are happening today.
- Radian6 will create the bridge between public social networks, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and Chatter, the private, secure social network for the enterprise. For the more than 80,000 companies that have already deployed Chatter, feeds will no longer contain just the activity happening within the walls of their company, but will be filled with real time insights from fans on Facebook pages, followers on Twitter, comments on blog posts and more.
- And developers will be able to build apps on the Force.com platform that tap into the power of Radian6, putting the social web into everything they build. In such a dynamic market, this acquisition will present a huge opportunity for salesforce.com to extend its developer and partner ecosystem with technology not available anywhere else.
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