Insights into how technology and the outsourcing of R&D are changing the software industry

Reported early this morning by TechCrunch, Salesforce.com

“announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Jigsaw, which provides crowd-sourced data services in the cloud, for approximately $142 million in cash, plus a performance-based earn out of up to 10% of the purchase price.”

Surprisingly, the deal’s not supposed to close for another year (Q2 2011).

I think this makes great sense for Salesforce.  What better match for a CRM company than to provide integrated access to a prospect database.  Additionally, the integration of Jigsaw’s  model for the automation of acquiring and keeping up-to-date business contact data plus Jigsaw’s own data cloud platform should shore up AppExchange’s standing within the ISVs and Enterprise community, which is increasingly important with the recent launch of Google’s App Marketplace.