Salesforce to acquire Buddy Media for $800 Million

Very interesting - SalesForce, who’s doing all the right moves will acquire Facebook CMS company Buddy Media for $800 Million. Well, BuddyMedia has built more than that over the years - the 5 years old company started as a simple CMS to build Facebook Apps, which then integrated with the Graph API, built reusable modules, analytics, profiling, and more.

SalesForce has had a strong offering, and are getting all the right components to become the one-stop-shop for all [social] CRM needs.

Many observers had assumed that Facebook, or a big ad holding company like WPP, would end up acquiring Buddy Media — especially since WPP is already an investor in the company, and recently announced a deal to route all of its Facebook ad buying through the company .

Instead, it appears that Salesforce intends to use Buddy Media to extend its core customer relationship management offering. The presumable logic: Acquiring Buddy Media will help Salesforce’s clients reach their customers and leads where they are spending lots of online time. Last year, Salesforce bought Radian6 , another social media platform company, for $326 million.

Buddy has raised a reported  $90 million. Investors valued it at $500 million  during its most recent funding round in August 2011.