Salesforce acquires Krux in bid to boost data analytics

UNITED STATES - The eve of Salesforce’s annual conference Dreamforce in San Francisco kicked off with the company announcing its acquisition of Krux, a San Francisco company that provides a data-management platform to help marketers.

The deal is reportedly for US$700 million in cash and stock, with a regulatory filing from Salesforce disclosing the company’s plans to pay US$340 million as the cash portion.

In a bid by the cloud-software giant to bolster its marketing-data and analytics segment, the addition of six-year-old Krux, is intended to extend the Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s audience segmentation and targeting capabilities to power consumer marketing with even more precision, at scale.

In addition, Krux will feed Salesforce Einstein, the company’s artificial intelligence platform, with billions of new signals, enabling companies to be even smarter about their customers.

In a blog post announcing the acquisition, Krux CEO Tom Chavez called it “great news for our current and future clients, our partner network and our employees.”

“We’re trading gas for rocket fuel,” he added.

Dreamforce 2016 kicks off on Tuesday, 4 October, and the company expected to make a slew of announcements around the expansion and enhancement of its existing product portfolio.