I was perusing some posts today and found one linking to a techcrunch.com article (seen here) discussion the salesforce.com(SFDC) purchase of Jigsaw.com. I found the purchase somewhat puzzling. In this post I’m really looking for my reader’s insight on the reasoning behind the purchase.
There are some obvious synergies between the two; SFDC is an industry leading CRM solution, and Jigsaw is a great source for contact information. If your company has a inside sales or marketing team, you have likely heard of jigsaw. From a strategic standpoint, I see this purchase making sense. When so many of SFDC’s customers use it as a source for data that creates records, normalizing values and standardizing field mappings would add to the ease of use for both tools strengthening the value proposition for cross selling opportunities. Also SFDC has its newer offering called chatter which is adding social media like functionality to the corporate CRM. This enterprise level technology applied to the jigsaw database could help make Jigsaw increasingly robust. Looking at the merger from this perspective, the deal seems like a no brainier.
My problem with this union however comes to the conflicting business models. Jigsaw is a crowd sourced list purchasing vendor. The social nature of it allows its global users to continually clean and verify the data lending it credibility; its very nature requires that the database be shared.
SFDC on the other hand is taking that same principal and applying it corporate data. The crowd is smaller and keeping that data private is a key concern for its constituents. Their products are starting to mimic other tools that users interact with on a daily basis and applying those same principals to the interaction with the corporate data stored on the SFDC servers. Even though their product is evolving to include functionality that is social in nature, this is more to better reflect the users experience and adoption.
I haven’t interacted with the Chatter product yet but it looks to be very powerful and in the right organization could add great value to the data and users within that organization. My question however is from a strategic standpoint. Put yourself in the shoes of an SFDC customer. You could potentially use both products, the CRM and Jigsaw services, and rightfully love them both, but think about that situation. How would you feel about the company you trust to keep your data safe, getting into the data sharing and selling business?
As an SFDC user, I trust that in general the company wouldn’t care about the data in my database. I think they care about the service they provide, and the security of the database, but the data itself is 100% my responsibility. Add in a secondary product based on the sale of the contents of the database and that introduces a conflict of interest that I think with be a delicate issue for PR & Marketing at SFDC to address in the future. I have complete confidence in the organization and from my dealings with their employees I know they have a culture that fosters security of the data above all else, but this is adding a level of doubt to the equation that could cause many question SFDC’s motives going forward that if not for me personally experiences with the companies employees I might tend to agree with.
Tell me in the comments below, what do you think of this merger, its implications on the future strategy, or if it impacts your view on SFDC as an org.
