Salesforce grows with cloud help-desk acquisition

Salesforce.com has acquired Assistly, an instant customer service help desk built for the cloud, for approximately $50 million in cash.

Assistly allows small companies and other organizations to rapidly set up and deliver social customer service and engage with them in real time via a range of social media options from one interface, according to the Sept. 22 announcement from Salesforce.com.

Adding Assistly to Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud family will enable the company to extend its reach to millions of small companies. The United States alone has 5.8 million businesses with 99 or fewer employees, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In August, the Census Bureau worked with systems integrator Acumen Solutions to transfer more than 257,000 partner organizations and associated data histories from an existing database and other sources to the Integrated Partner Contact Database, a cloud-based customer relationship management system based on Salesforce.com’s software-as-a-service CRM offering.