RelateIQ pulls data from multiple sources to produce insights about your working relationships. Credit: RelateIQ.
Last week, Salesforce.com (CRM -1.55%) made an all-stock $390 million bet on data by acquiring "relationship intelligence" company RelateIQ. Fool contributor Tim Beyers explains the implications in the following video.
Think of it as more algorithmically driven version of the original Salesforce platform. RelateIQ brings together information from email, calendar, phone, and more -- every touchpoint, really -- to provide insights into how sales staff and other personnel conduct business on a daily basis.
Will RelateIQ make a difference for owners of Salesforce stock? Over the long term, certainly. Data is the key to getting new and existing customers to expand their relationship with Salesforce, and bigger contracts are the company's bread and butter. Salesforce had over $7 billion in total booked business as of May.
In the meantime, Tim says it's important to look at the whole picture. Salesforce isn't just making deals to boost revenue and profit. Rather, CEO Marc Benioff and his team are building a whole platform for helping clients make better business decisions.
Consider the company's recently announced Mobile Reports & Dashboards. Using them, any smartphone user of the Salesforce1 apps can drill down and take action on key business trends found among the bits and bytes stored online. Adding data-driven tools such as RelateIQ advances a strategy that's already in place.
By itself, RelateIQ isn't a catalyst. What it represents -- a move to bring more data to more customers, more often, wherever they are -- is the only catalyst that matters when considering the future of Salesforce stock.
