Salesforce buys productivity software maker Quip for $750 million

CRM company Salesforce acquires Quip, an online word processing and spreadsheet application. It is said that an amount of about 750 million dollars is involved, of which 582 million dollars in shares.

The total of 750 million is an estimate that TechCrunch makes based on data from anonymous sources. Quip will continue under its own name, but under Salesforce, according to a blog post. Both Quip founder Bret Taylor, former Facebook CTO, and Kevin Gibbs, former Google employee, will remain in their posts following the acquisition.

Quip is a direct competitor to Google Docs and Microsoft Office. It hopes to gain a larger user base through Salesforce faster through its customer relationship management software offerings.

On the other hand, Microsoft is again a major competitor of Salesforce with Dynamics CRM, which means that data that Quip can collect can be interesting for Salesforce again. At the moment, Salesforce can collect relatively little data about its users due to the type of software it provides. To provide better support for digital personal assistants through machine learning, data collected through Quip is valuable, Business Insider writes.

Salesforce was also in the running to acquire LinkedIn, but had to give way to Microsoft with its $26.5 billion bid for LinkedIn. Salesforce wanted to acquire LinkedIn because of the recruitment division that generates a lot of revenue. Microsoft has also tried to acquire Salesforce in the past.