This is insane. $2.5b for a company that has lost money through its existence, has a very small set of (likely not-so-diverse) clients (6,000ish), and makes 10% of what they paid for them in revenue? Strikes me as a crazy purchase, but perhaps there's something else afoot that I don't see. I've been proven wrong about this stuff before.
Oracle has been doing this for years (and probably where Benioff got his playbook) They buy up a company, fold in their customers and cross-sell their other products to them.
As a company "born Cloud", Salesforce have had to make sure their integration capabilities have been up to snuff, and other vendors have been able to leverage those integrations to reach Salesforce customers via the AppExchange (similar to the App Store).
So the capability of using Salesforce whilst using other apps with integration has been a capability for a while, and so customers could tailor their own solutions to their needs, budgets etc. Except that more and more, customers want the one-back-to-pat/one-neck-to-strangle, and the associated 'one-solution, no integration' benefits. Hence Salesforce have been parking their tanks on the lawns of service providers. When asked for features, Salesforce response is sometimes "There's an app for that", however sometimes the demand for them to provide certain functionality is so great, or the opportunity large enough, that they'll enter a market in this fashion. They're currently doing something similar with identity management. Ping Identity had a solution they could sell you, but soon they'll have to compete with Salesforce Identity.
Competing with someone who hosts the platform you're working on is possible, but it's definitely a disadvantage.
The other factor here is what the other players are up to - Oracle recently purchased Eloqua, and for those of us in the Salesforce line of work, an acquisition like this has been expected for the last few months. Email marketing is an area in which Salesforce has been weak for some time, they didn't want to do it because it's not their core focus, and hey, "there are apps for that". But once Oracle moved, Salesforce were going to follow suit to block that advantage.
Reminds me a lot of Palantir.
That said, moving email providers is likely a huge pain in the ass for those 6000 customers. They are basically locked in for years and years. There may be potential to raise prices and gain profit from those customers. Internal investment to move vendors is likely in the hundreds of thousands.
Salesforce already has a few of these same clients through BuddyMedia and other B2C offerings, but the cross sell of a marketing suite is what they are envisioning. I expect that outside of a potential Marketo purchase, they will purchase companies with more b2c or general marketing offerings, potentially search, display or other ad related products to compliment Social.com.
This has allowed ExactTarget to spend more money on developers (like me), products, and to acquire other businesses.
It ran a $21 million loss on $292 million in revenue last year.
Before making the judgement that "psh, they're not profitable", be sure the vectors look right. For example, have they been making that margin smaller and smaller, and is the revenue getting larger and larger? If so, then they're fine in the long term, and it's a sound investment.
I don't get the fascination with subsidized revenue growth - almost anyone can do that with massive infusions of cash.
The larger issue is that short term profitability is not the only thing to look at. It should certainly be one thing to consider, but there are lots of examples of companies that became enormous after a long period of unprofitability. And since ET has so much revenue and only 7% loss compared to that revenue, I can totally see how this would be a good investment for Salesforce.