Salesforce.com paid $31.5 million to buy out InStranet, which markets a knowledge base used by customer service call centers and customer self-service Web portals. InStranet was an AppExchange partner, which had provided its knowledge base technology as part of a number of Salesforce.com on-demand CRM deployments.
Salesforce.com, a 9-year-old company that has grown mostly from
internal expansion, disclosed on Aug. 20 that it has acquired AppExchange
partner InStranet, the producer of customer service knowledge base technology,
for $31.5 million.
InStranet’s knowledge base technology is used by business-to-consumer or
business-to-business customer service call centers to give service agents
online reference and policy databases to answer customers’ questions. It can
also be deployed as a searchable Web-based self-service portal to help
customers answer their own questions.
InStranet was founded in 1999, the same year as Salesforce.com, by CEO
Alex Davon and Executive Vice President Jean-Noel Grandval, who were both
former executives at Business Objects.
Salesforce.com acquired InStranet, which has been an AppExchange partner
since 2005, “because we believe that they have the best knowledge base
technology for customer service and support in the market,” said Brett Queener,
Salesforce.com’s senior vice president of applications.
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