digibyte - last-minute Christmas shopping for Salesforce and Oracle

Salesforce and Oracle bought themselves a couple of last-minute gifts for Christmas.

Salesforce announced it has acquired quote-to-cash firm SteelBrick for a total of $360 million, while Oracle snapped up Texas start-up Stack Engine, a Dev Ops provider of containers tech.

SteelBrick chief executive Godard Abel says:

Being a part of Salesforce will give us an amazing opportunity to accelerate our delivery of fully integrated Quote-to-Cash applications right within Salesforce, helping thousands more customers grow revenue faster than ever before.

SteelBrick has around 350 customers.

Quote-to-Cash capability is something that Salesforce has previously left to partners, most notably Apttus. How that relationship pans out now will be interesting to observe. For example, the once-tight Marketo-Salesforce partnership hasn't  exactly thrived since Salesforce got its own marketing cloud functionality in-house.

The SteelBrick CPQ was built and delivered natively via the Salesforce1 Platform and Abel cited the firm's role in the Salesforce ecosystem when he said:

Many of our team members have already enjoyed growing their careers in the vibrant Salesforce ecosystem as customers and partners for many years.

Meanwhile Oracle's latest purchase gives it some skin in the containers space and allows it to catch-up with the likes of Microsoft and Amazon which have adopted Docker technology.

Separately the firm announced plans for a cloud campus in Texas with the intention of growing its Austin workforce by 50% over the next few years.

My take

Well, if you can't treat yourself at Christmas...

 

Disclosure - at time of writing, Oracle and Salesforce are premier partners of diginomica. Marketo is a partner.