RelateIQ and Salesforce: It’s not just about data science
By observing the reactions to a big acquisition, you can typically learn a lot about the broader market. In the case of Salesforce.com’s acquisition of RelateIQ, the reactions I’ve heard from customers and influencers have fallen into two camps:
“Why did RelateIQ — one of the hottest enterprise startups in a dynamic segment of the market — sell so early, when it still had so much potential for growth?” Unsurprisingly, I’ve heard this largely from the Valley cognoscenti.
“Who is RelateIQ, and why was Salesforce willing to pay so much money for them?” This reaction tends to come from people outside the Valley, including influential sales enablement professionals and well connected customer-relationship management analysts.
When an industry gorilla pays top dollar for a company whose impact has not yet been felt in the broader market, you can be confident that we are (a) in the very early days of (b) a big tectonic shift in the market.
Most of the articles written to this point about RelateIQ and Salesforce have confined the tectonic shift to data science. We see the revolution taking place in the enterprise as much, much bigger than that. Yes, data science and predictive analytics are part of it … but only as a means to providing a dramatically better experience for users. To achieve that end goal, you need more than a better, more insightful back end. You must combine a top-notch back end with a beautiful mobile-first design to create products that are not only easy to use, but that people naturally want to use. Don’t get me wrong: I believe RelateIQ has this. We just aren’t reading about it.
