Salesforce Buys EdgeSpring and ExactTarget

US software giant Salesforce has bought enterprise BI and analytics start-up EdgeSpring, for an undisclosed sum, following its reported $2.5bn acquisition last week of marketing software company ExactTarget.

Digital marketing agency ExactTarget helps clients communicate with customers through e-mail, mobile, social media and web sites, and last year acquired predictive analytics / customer behavior specialist iGoDigital. The buy givesSalesforce an email-marketing platform it can use with its Social.com campaign development offer.

EdgeSpring's platform, which includes data store EdgeMart and the Lens Framework dynamic visualization engine, helps clients build analytics applications for Business Intelligence data including sales and financial information in structured and semi-structured formats. The company emerged from stealth mode just last month, announcing it had raised $11m in Series A venture funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Lightspeed Ventures.

The firm's CEO and co-founder Vijay Chakravarthy (pictured), himself a former Salesforce exec, writes: 'Business Intelligence and Analytics in the enterprise is a massively painful and IMHO still largely unsolved problem today. Being a part of Salesforce.com will give us a tremendous opportunity to take our technology to the next level and deliver truly amazing innovation to solve this high value problem'. He adds: 'I am also excited to be (re)joining a company that shares the values that we hold true here at EdgeSpring: being strongly customer centric and focused on bringing consumer-like ease of use to the enterprise.'

Salesforce has not yet made clear whether it will continue to sell EdgeSpring's technology in its existing guise or go for an absorb-and-shut-down approach as adopted by a number of big buyers recently (cf. Yahoo! and PollGo).

Web sites: www.salesforce.com and www.edgespring.com .