By Jessica Roy 10/24/12 4:53pm

Shakeups

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff (Photo: Wikipedia)

Following New Details of Buddy Media Acquisition, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Lays off Employees [Updated]

After rumors began swirling on Twitter about layoffs at Salesforce, the cloud-computing company confirmed to Business Insider that it has laid off a fair chunk of its Radian6 employees. Salesforce says that less than 100 employees were impacted, but considering that Radian6 boasts only 320 employees total (according to Crunchbase), that’s still almost a third of the staffers being shown the door.

Radian6, a social media monitoring platform, is an integral part of Salesforce’s big play for a piece of the social marketing space. It acquired Radian6 back in March 2011 in order to build out the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Read More

By Jessica Roy 5/29/12 7:43pm

Acquisitions

Michael Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media (flickr.com/leweb3)

An Acquisition for Buddy Media Makes Sense—After FB’s Dive, It Can’t IPO

AllThingsD is reporting that social marketing company Buddy Media is in talks to be acquired by Salesforce for $800 million. We had been hearing similar rumors ourselves, and reached out to Buddy Media last week, but the company refused to confirm, saying only, “We’ve been hearing this kind of chatter since the day we started the company, and it has always turned out to be false.”

An acquisition for Buddy makes sense–Facebook’s bungled IPO (its stock dropped another 10 percent today) left little room for companies with offerings reliant upon Facebook to go public themselves. And judging from Buddy’s hiring of an “IPO-ready CFO” last August, an IPO was its preferred route. Read More