Zoho CEO: Salesforce acquires, acquires, acquires, while we build, build, build

Yesterday, Salesforce agreed to pay $2.5 billion for ExactTarget, and of course, Zoho chief, Sridhar Vembu, could not silently pass this event. Five years ago Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tried to buy Zoho, and being refused, banned them on Force.com platform. So Sridhar loves to troll Mark, and yesterday he was on a roll. Here are the most interesting quotes from his speech:

"ExactTarget, which competes with our Zoho Campaigns product, has about 1600 employees, while all of Zoho Corp has about 1600 employees. By way of comparison, Salesforce has nearly 10,000 employees, and they are adding those additional 1600 employees today. With all that headcount, they still don’t have the breadth and depth of Zoho."

"ExactTarget has lost money for years and Salesforce is not exactly a profit-machine either – they spend over 65% of their revenue on sales, marketing and administration. Most acquisitions fail, but in this case, maybe the two companies do have a deep cultural fit, because they both know how to spend loads and loads of money to “acquire” customers while never turning a profit."

"Zoho Campaigns is now enjoying rapid growth and market acceptance, thanks to its nice feature set and the integration we offer with Zoho CRM. To get that same level of integration, Salesforce is shelling out $2.5 billion. But you know what?  I am a software engineer and I say with confidence that integration projects on the scale needed to integrate ExactTarget into Salesforce are extremely difficult to pull off in any reasonable time frame. Salesforce has done these deals before, without ever integrating them."

"About 3 years ago, Salesforce acquired Heroku, shelling out $212 million for the company. Visit Heroku.com and see if you can detect any sign of Salesforce anywhere. Visit Do.com and Desk.com – both of which Salesforce acquired a while ago – yeah, there is nice logo level integration, I will give them points for that. Try to sign in with your Salesforce account in any of these sites."

"The Salesforce playbook is simple. Benioff feels restless, he sees stagnation, sees companies like Zoho continuing to innovate, he just goes out and does a blockbuster deal to feel good, more money the better. And if you are a Salesforce customer, you are going to have to pay for this acquisition"

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