Skip to main content

Salesforce Takes a Stake in CloudCraze - A Snap Analysis from Down Under

A few days ago B2B e-commerce vendor Cloudcraze announced that it secured a $20 million funding of Insight Venture Partners under participation of Salesforce Ventures. Cloudcraze is one of few ecommerce platforms that are fully built on Salesforceā€™s Force.com platform, which gives them a very good position inside the Salesforce ecosystem. Integrations with Salesforce Sales- and Service Clouds come easy, enabling fast implementations and go-lives. Additionally, having a B2B focus, Cloudcraze serves a market niche that is poised to grow significantly in the next 3 ā€“ 5 years. Forrester already in 2015 predicted a market growth to more than a trillion dollar in the US alone. Gartner positions them in the Visionary quadrant of their 2016 Magic Quadrant on Digital Commerce.
Gartner MQ Digital Commerce 2016 - Source: Gartner

Given all this I was somewhat surprised when Salesforce acquired the B2C focused ecommerce platform Demandware in May 2016, considering that Salesforce has B2B roots, too. Additionally, Demandware is not even built on the Salesforce stack. On the other hand, Demandware is categorized a leader in the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce and with its B2C focus offers new markets for Salesforce, competing with SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle on one hand, and ecommerce pure-plays on the other. These are markets that Salesforce could have been locked out without this acquisition as Demandware was the last independent leading ecommerce platform.

My Take

With this investment Salesforce shows again that they treat ecommerce seriously, without being in the immediate need to explain their strategy around two different ecommerce platforms, as the investment is led by Insight. The investment should help making sure that Salesforce Sales Cloud deployments get connected with a Salesforce based ecommerce instead of one of the other strong ecommerce platforms that are available. It also gives a measure of security against competitors trying to enter the Salesforce ecosystem.
Salesforce also could get access to a richer CPQ functionality than its own product offers (Apptus, another CPQ vendor in the Salesforce ecosystem last year decided to port its apps to Azure).

For Cloudcraze this funding round means an even deeper immersion into the Salesforce ecosystem. The company has been platinum partner before; now the orbit has become even closer. The investment as such may well enable them to move up from the Visionary quadrant to the Leader quadrant, given a sizeable investment that is targeted towards ā€˜supercharging developmentā€™ and supporting ā€˜continued growth in the United States and EMEAā€™. The investment might also mean a step on a path that ultimately leads to being acquired.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. Nvizion Solutions28 April 2022 at 01:46

    Implementing a sales force insights system will not only enhance your sales by increasing customer interactions, but it will also streamline all of your activities and keep all of your data in one location. This collaboration can help entrepreneurs manage everything, whether their firm has hundreds of employees or only a few.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Last Year's Top 5 Popular Posts

SAP CRM and SAP Jam - News from CRM evolution

During CRM Evolution 2017 I had the chance of talking with Volker Hildebrand and Anthony Leaper from SAP. Volker is SAPā€™s Global Vice President SAP Hybris and Anthony is Senior Vice President and Sales GM - Enterprise Social Software at SAP. Topics that we covered were things CRM and collaboration, how and where SAPā€™s solutions are moving and, of course, the impact that the recent reshuffling in the executive board has. Starting with the latter, there is common agreement, that if at all it is positive as likely to streamline reporting lines and hence decision processes. First things first ā€“ after all I am a CRM guy. Having the distinct impression that the SAP Hybris set of solutions is going a good way I was most interested in learning from Volker about how there is going to be a CRM for S4/HANA. SAPā€™s new generation ERP system is growing at a good clip, and according to the Q1/2017 earnings call, now has 5,800 customers with 400 new customers in the last quarter alone. Many...
2 comments
Read more

Sweet Transformation: Inside SugarCRMā€™s New Direction

Fresh from the 2025 SugarCRM Analyst Summit, waiting for my plane home, it is time to sort my thoughts. From Monday, 1/27 evening to Wednesday 1/29 in the morning we had some time jam packed with information and good conversations with SugarCRM execs, customers, and in between analysts. The main summit started with a bang, namely the announcement that industry icon Bob Stutz joins the SugarCRM board of directors , which is something that few of us, if any, had foreseen. This is exciting news.  With David Roberts , who succeeded Craig Charlton in September 2024, SugarCRM itself has a new CEO with a long time CRM pedigree.  As with every leadership change, this promises some change. Every new CEO evaluates what they see vs. where they want their company to go and then, together with the team, establishes and executes a plan to get there. Usually, this involves some change in the structure of the executive leadership team, too.  This is what happened and happens with SugarCR...
Post a Comment
Read more

SaaS or the Rise of the Undead

SaaS is dead! It will be replaced by agentic systems that replace coded business logic by AI agents that autonomously interact to bring said business logic to life, just smarter. Satya Nadella said it - or at least something in these lines, if I believe all the pundits around. His words lit up the Internet. And Satya Nadella being the CEO of a 3 trillion dollar company is the ultimate fount of truth and wisdom, when it comes to business applications. Is he not? So, what should we take from his statements? After all, the words of the CEO of one of the top 3 valuable companies on this Earth carry some weight. Let me start straight.  I call BS! SaaS, first of all, is a delivery model of logic that also had some implications on vendorsā€˜ business models and their approaches to pricing. For a variety of good and not so good reasons this delivery model succeeded vs. the prevalent model of on-premises software. Some of the more important reasons have been ā€œno lock in by vendorsā€, ā€œonly pay...
Post a Comment
Read more

Salesforce stock tanks after earnings report - a snap analysis

The news On May 29, 2024, Salesforce reported its results for the first quarter of the fiscal year 2025. Highlights are a total quarterly revenue of $9.133bn US, resembling a year-over-year growth of 11 percent a current remaining performance obligation of $26.4bn US a remaining performance obligation of $53.9B US an operating margin of 18.7 percent. diluted earnings per share of $1.56 The company reported a revenue guidance of $9.2bn - $9.25bn US for the next quarter and a full year guidance of $37.7bn - $38.0bn US, resembling growth rates of 7 ā€“ 8 percent and 8 ā€“ 9 percent, respectively. With these numbers, Salesforce ended up at the lower end of last quarterā€™s guidance on the revenue growth side while exceeding the earnings per share projection and slightly lowered the guidance for the fiscal year 2025. The result: The companyā€™s share price dropped from $272 to bottom out at $212. The bigger picture Salesforce is the big gorilla in the CRM and CX industry. The company has surpassed ...
Post a Comment
Read more

ZohoDay 2025 Brings Enterprise Swagger to the Lake

Zoho held its annual ZohoDays outside of Austin in the beautiful Horseshoe Bay resort. While this is a good way away from Austin proper, it also gave the opportunity to have long and good conversations with Zoho execs, customers and fellow analysts outside of the conference and meeting rooms. And guess what, this is exactly what happened.  Big time kudos to Sandy Lo with her amazing team for organizing this and of course also to all the Zoho execs, including the newly minted Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu, Zohoā€™s new CEO Mani Vembu, Tony Thomas, Raju Vegesna, Vijay Sundaram and many more, who all were more than willing to share information and, even more importantly, get feedback. The latter is not something that we analysts take for granted. Besides the usual ā€“ and important ā€“ state of the business update by Vijay Sundaram, the event revolved around three main topics Ā·       AI Ā·       Enterprise and partner strategy Ā·       Industry str...
1 comment
Read more