Manymoon, makers of a popular online collaboration software-as-a-service, announced today that it has been acquired by Salesforce.com. Manymoon ranks as one of the most popular applications in both the Google Apps Marketplace and the LinkedIn Application Directory. According to the announcement, Manymoon will continue to exist as a separate business within Salesforce.com and will continue to offer both its free and premium services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Salesforce.com has been on an acquisition spree. In the past few months, it has purchased: Jigsaw, Sitemasher, Activa Live Chat, Heroku, Etacts and Dimdim. Salesforce.com also invested $4 million in Seesmic today.
According to the announcement:
- Manymoon Standard, our free product, will continue to be available for existing and new customers. In fact, we’ll continue to add features to our free product. And, if you want to upgrade, you are welcome to do that through the Manymoon website whenever you like.
- Existing premium features, subscriptions and price points will remain unchanged.
- Manymoon will continue to work with Google Apps, LinkedIn and the Chrome Web Store. And, we will continue to develop new features to enhance support of these platforms.
- We’ll continue to support our customers in the Manymoon Support Universe.
What does Manymoon bring to Salesforce.com that Chatter doesn’t already have? Project management. Dimdim will add conferencing to Chatter, and project management is the next logical step towards making Chatter a fully featured collaboration suite. But that’s assuming that Salesforce.com will actually integrate Manymoon into Chatter – the initial announcement from Manymoon makes that uncertain.
Sameer Patel of the Sovo Group told us in response to the announcement:
With its strong project facilitation focus, Manymoon brings solid complementary ‘get-it-done’ functionality to a general purpose engagement platform such as Salesforce.com Chatter. As important, the Google Apps Marketplace is quickly becoming a valid choice for more and more enterprises.
Manymoon’s strong integration with the Google Apps Marketplace may well offer a needed bridge between Force.com and Google App Marketplace. Thanks to Manymoon’s integration with Google’s productivity applications such as word processing, spreadsheets and contact management, Salesforce.com now gets to tout a more complete collaboration picture that includes engagement, task management and content creation.
The top review for Salesforce for Google Apps reads “Best CRM out there but poor integration with Google Apps.” The application has only two stars. Perhaps this acquisition will help Salesforce.com improve its integration with Google Apps.
Manymoon competes with Huddle and PBWorks in the project-centric collaboration SaaS market.
