Salesforce’s M&A Target List Excluded Twitter

Salesforce eyed 14 companies as possible M&A targets in May but Twitter was not among them, according to leaked Colin Powell emails.

Some of Salesforce’s acquisitions took years to develop, the emails reveal.

Months before Salesforce.com considered buying Twitter, the company was looking at more than a dozen acquisition targets that didn’t include the social-media giant, according to an internal presentation for its board members.

The presentation came from a trove of thousands of former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s emails that was published in September by DCLeaks, a website of self-described “hacktivists” that releases documents from government officials and other prominent people. Mr Powell sits on Salesforce’s board of directors.

Titled M&A Target Review and marked “draft and confidential,” the 60-slide document identified 14 possible targets, from design- and marketing-software maker Adobe Systems (which has a current market value of $US53.7 billion, slightly larger than Salesforce itself), to Pegasystems, a vendor of business-automation software valued at $US2.3bn.

Read the leaked presentation here.

The list included at least two companies that Salesforce has shown interest in since May: Demandware, which Salesforce in June agreed to acquire for $US2.8bn, andLinkedIn, for which it lost a bidding war to Microsoft that same month.

The presentation provides a peek into the kind of discussions around deal making that many big companies have, almost always in private. It was sent to directors ahead of a board meeting on May 20, amid a particularly active M&A period for the tech industry generally and in particular for Salesforce, which agreed to acquire nine companies for a total of $US3.8bn between February and September of this year.

Chief Executive Marc Benioff defended Salesforce’s approach to acquisitions after news of its interest in Twitter surfaced, triggering pushback from his shareholders. “We look at a lot of things and we pass on almost everything,” he said at an October 5 meeting with investors.

Most of the companies mentioned declined to comment. A Pegasystems spokesperson said, “While flattering to appear on another organisation’s acquisition target list, we have not had any discussions with Salesforce on the topic of acquisition.”

Mr Powell’s emails are from the same cache disclosed last month that included the former Secretary of State’s comments on major US political figures, but the emails related to his role at Salesforce haven’t previously been reported.

A spokeswoman for Mr Powell declined to comment.

A spokeswoman for Salesforce, which sells web-based software for sales, marketing and customer service, described the presentation as a “landscape” of possible publicly owned targets at the time it was created and stressed that the appearance of company names on the list didn’t mean Salesforce ever intended to buy them.

“Salesforce has a disciplined and thoughtful M&A process where we routinely survey the industry landscape across a wide range of companies, but acquire very few,” the Salesforce spokeswoman said.

The May document doesn’t mention private companies, although Salesforce since May has bought several: BeyondCore, a provider of data-analytics software; Quip, which makes smartphone apps for creating and editing documents; and Krux, which provides information that helps companies improve their marketing and advertising.

The presentation listed code names for four of the potential targets, all the names of famous wine-making regions. Demandware, to which about one-third of the presentation is devoted, was called Champagne, while LinkedIn was code named Burgundy. ServiceNow, a business software firm with a current market value around $US12.4bn, was dubbed Sonoma, and also accounted for about a third of the presentation’s slides. Tableau Software, which makes data visualisation software, was listed as Tuscany.

An email to Mr Powell dated June 2 and also published in the DCLeaks cache shows Mr Benioff saying that Salesforce had a better chance of beating Microsoft than he had previously understood. Microsoft agreed to buy LinkedIn for $US196 a share in cash, or $US26.2bn in total.

“We were closer than we realised — maybe a $US105 cash plus $US105 stock would have done it!” Mr Benioff wrote, referring to LinkedIn.

The presentation contains notes on several of the targets. LinkedIn was listed as “in exclusivity,” possibly referring to an agreement LinkedIn struck with Microsoft on May 13, according to LinkedIn corporate filings. While Salesforce’s bid for LinkedIn puzzled some observers, Mr Benioff subsequently told investors that the company considers buying “marquee monopolistic brands” as they become available.

There are no such notes for Adobe, which given its size would be an odd target for Salesforce. The Salesforce spokeswoman said that Adobe appeared only as a “benchmark” to provide context for possible targets.

The presentation also included Adobe among a list of 13 large companies dubbed “interlopers” that appear to be potential rivals in doing acquisitions. That list also included Microsoft and Apple.

The leaked document also appears to indicate that some of the technology companies mentioned may have been for sale at the time. Like other companies on the list that have since been sold, Tableau is marked “In Play.”

Some of the potential targets have since been acquired by other companies. Marketing automation firm Marketo soon after the presentation said that Vista Equity Partners had agreed to buy it for $US1.79bn. Salesforce rival Oracle in June agreed to acquire NetSuite, for $US9.3bn, a deal that still awaits approval by NetSuite shareholders.

And data-visualization firm Qlik Technologies later was purchased by Thoma Bravo, a private-equity firm, for $US3bn. Salesforce ultimately bought BeyondCore, a competitor of Qlik and Tableau, for about $US110m.

Salesforce clearly viewed some of the companies listed as long shots. Box Inc., which offers online file-sharing and collaboration services, and Zendesk, a maker of customer-service software, appear on the list with the note “CEO has no interest.” Similarly, human resources software provider Workday Inc. is noted as “less interested.” It isn’t clear which parties lacked interest.

Some of Salesforce’s acquisitions took years to develop, the emails reveal. Salesforce on August 1 announced its agreement to buy closely held Quip for $US582m in stock.

“I’m very excited about this acquisition,” wrote Mr Benioff in a July 26 email message included in the Powell cache. “We have been after this for three years.”

Wall Street Journal