Salesforce gave us a barrage of news yesterday evening. Alongside the quarterly earnings, Salesforce also announced that Keith Block was stepping down from his position as Co-CEO, leaving Marc Benioff to hold the fort as sole CEO.
But in more exciting news, they also announced the acquisition of Vlocity for $1.33B. Vlocity is a special breed of Salesforce ISV that focuses on industry-specific solutions for the Salesforce platform. Another company you might be familiar with in this space is Veeva, which builds specific solutions for the life-sciences industry (Currently public listed and worth $22.28B). These applications are not often brought up in conversation unless you are in an industry they focus on, but it’s big business to build industry-specific solutions
Vlocity – Industry Cloud Apps
Vlocity is a strategic Salesforce ISV that builds industry-specific Apps on their platform. They cover 6 main industries, Communications, Media, Energy, Insurance, Health & Government. Vlocity fits into the market place by supercharging the Salesforce platform for customers that are in these industries. For example, Vlocity knows how the Communications industry works and has created a specific application on top of Force.com that allows them to provide more powerful processes and features, than say, customizing Sales/Service Cloud from scratch.
Vlocity partners with some of the world’s leading companies in these categories, including the likes of T Mobile, Sky, Zurich, Vodafone & BT.
This Acquisition does not come as a surprise for many, with founders and a lot of the senior management team at Vlocity coming from Salesforce. Vlocity have also run their industry cloud strategy alongside Salesforce’s industry-specific products, such as Financial Services Cloud & Health Cloud. I think this provides us with a clear path for how Vlocity will fit into the existing Salesforce suite of products, providing further industry products for some of the biggest enterprise industries out there.
