US$588M Acquisition of Quip, Salesforce Facing Microsoft Office

Today, the US (CRM) software service provider Salesforce publicly stated that they acquired Quip, an office collaboration software company, for US$582 million. However, news from TechCrunch shows that some cash expenses were also included in the transaction, and the overall acquisition value reached US$750 million.

After the acquisition took place, the Quip official responded to the company's official website blog for the first time:

We and Salesforce have the same understanding of software: the mobile era, cloud sharing.

As a global leader in software service providers, Salesforce is the first to shift the core business to the direction of enterprise cloud computing. In 2012, Quip also began to imagine the development of a productivity tool that would allow all teams to collaborate.

The development of Salesforce is inseparable from the success of users. The "customer first" corporate culture coincides with our understanding of customer relationships. For this reason, we are very happy to join Salesforce. Everyone Quip users, we will continue to provide you with excellent service and exceptional product experience as always. After the transaction is completed, we will provide a consistent service for everyone as part of the world's first "CRM" company.

For this acquisition, foreign technology media said that Salesforce only spent 750 million US dollars to let them win the opportunity to challenge Microsoft and Google.

All along, Salesforce is committed to providing its customers with the customer relationship management platform that it needs to use. However, in the acquisition of user content data, competitors Microsoft is one step ahead. Office 365 obtains user data by accessing data and documents in user spreadsheets, and creates a new generation of smart sales applications based on the data. Earlier, Microsoft spent 2.6 billion US dollars to acquire Linkedin, is hoping to create a new generation of smart sales applications from LinkedIn's professional network data. However, there is news that Salesforce wanted to acquire LinkedIn, but Microsoft's halfway out, resulting in Salesforce missing LinkedIn.

As a direct competitor to Microsoft Office 365, Quip has a good experience on the mobile side, enabling users to achieve real-time online collaboration, editing documents and forms. In addition, Quip also integrates the Slack service, allowing users to communicate in real-time while editing documents. Therefore, in order to own its own document form management software, the acquisition of startup Quip becomes a reasonable choice.

According to data, Quip has seen rapid growth of users on the PC side. In early 2014, 80% of Quip users came from mobile devices. With the release of the PC version of software, in July 2015, Quip’s mobile device users and PC users each accounted for about half. At the end of October 2015, 60% of all users of Quip came from computers, and 40% came from mobile phones, of which 12% came from tablets. After the acquisition of Quip, Salesforce is expected to implant Quip services in its own enterprise products to further increase the market share of Quip. This cooperation will also bring certain impact on Office's inherent office software market.

For Salesforce and Quip, the acquisition is a win-win deal.