The Microsoft Purchase of LinkedIn yesterday for over $26 billion dollars was big news. Today the big news should be how that purchase is now an elephant in the room for Salesforce.
A few years ago, LinkedIn locked down their APIs to a very small number of ” development partners”. Namely – Microsoft and Salesforce. The LinkedIn APIs allowed development partners to integrate the information within third party applications such as CRM records. It was reported that the lockdown of the LinkedIn APIs could really impact smaller sized CRMs such as Nimble. At the time, Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara attempted to downplay the impact.
My business partner and I were particularly interested in this API lockdown and its implications because we use a variety of third-party digital information as part of our Social Business and Research practices. We started digging into this and based on our research we found that Salesforce had a pretty deep integration of LinkedIn information.
So now that Microsoft is purchasing LinkedIn, it begs the question – What now for Salesforce?
I have been in the high-tech space for almost 20 years. I have seen many amazing changes. But there is one constant. The law, in this case, business law is almost always behind. It should be interesting if this purchase has legal implications for Microsoft. And more importantly, how Salesforce will avail themselves of every tool to ensure that they do not lose their LinkedIn API access which has made their platform a key tool in people’s social selling tool set.
follow me @greefkes on most social sites.
This post also published on LinkedIn
Photo credit: © Tiero | Dreamstime.com – Elephant In A Room Photo
