Salesforce.com Acquires Jigsaw Business Contact Software Co.

Salesforce.com announced on April 21 that it had entered into an agreement to acquire Jigsaw, a company that uses crowdsourcing to build and maintain an online database of business contacts. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of fiscal year 2011, with Salesforce.com reportedly paying around $142 million.

Salesforce.com said it intends to combine its cloud-based CRM applications and platform with Jigsaw’s own cloud model for data acquisition and structuring, giving Salesforce.com an entry into the $3 billion market for cloud-based business-to-business data services. At the same time, the acquisition will open up new opportunities for Salesforce.com’s third-party developers, who theoretically will be able to build applications that use Jigsaw’s business-contact data, and will allow for partnerships between Salesforce.com and data-trafficking companies such as LexisNexis.