Citing “people familiar with the matter”, Bloomberg describes the cloud services company as “a potential rival bidder for LinkedIn.in the process leading up to the professional networking website’s acquisition by Microsoft”.
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I assume most of you know of what I speak, but let me be doubly certain: Microsoft greeted us on Monday morning with news that it is acquiring LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, or $196 per share – an all-cash transaction.
Microsoft will acquire LinkedIn for about US$26.2 billion, one of the largest technology-industry deals on record, as the maker of Windows and Office software attempts to put itself at the centre of people’s business lives.
Indeed, Recode claimed that, according to sources, Salesforce was most interested in what LinkedIn is best known for – its recruiting business, which brings in most of its revenue.
Salesforce is a competitor to Microsoft in the field of cloud based software and services and both businesses have long coveted LinkedIn’s trove of workforce data to push their own software.
LinkedIn’s analytics will help power data tools for Microsoft’s Dynamics, which competes with Salesforce.com Inc in helping companies manage relationships with their customers.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, who will retain that role following the acquisition, painted a rosy future built around the companies’ shared vision to empower enterprise professionals and organizations. LinkedIn profiles are packed with information on everything from users’ skills and responsibilities at past jobs to methods for contacting them.
“We’re not winning every deal”, he said on CNBC in early June.
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The price paid by Microsoft to buy Linkedin is almost half of the $55.9bn market capitalisation of Salesforce. Nevertheless, only time can tell if this deal will go the way of write-off like Nokia, or if Microsoft will transform LinkedIn into something truly incredible.
