The San Francisco-based Salesforce made the announcement today and it will be the largest acquisition in its history, more than twice the $6.5 billion it paid for MuleSoft in 2018. Salesforce says it will officially establish its second headquarters in Seattle.

Salesforce will use the acquisition to double down on business intelligence through powerful new data visualisations. The deal is expected to escalate competition between Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which competes with Tableau through its Power BI data visualisation technology.

Industry experts across data and associated software say the deal makes sense for Salesforce and ultimately provides greater insight and options for customers.

Ray Johnson, chief data scientist at SPR, said: “Data provides the ideal mechanism for the summary and distribution of insights. But it can be confusing, and data visualisation provides a quick and concise method for making sense out of chaos. A simple line chart can convey far more information than a large table consisting of hundreds of lines of data. Making data more comprehensible is key to better decision making. The better insights, the better the decision making, increasing the potential for future growth.”

“This acquisition allows Salesforce to ultimately provide an integrated and bundled solution that customers can leverage to drive growth. Existing Tableau users could benefit from easier Salesforce integration and Salesforce users could get a well-established data visualisation platform.”

Dustin Grosse, chief marketing and strategy officer at Nintex, said: “As a Seattle-area firm, Nintex is excited to see Salesforce making an investment of this size in a strong local company and Marc Benioff announcing Seattle as Salesforce’s HQ2. This move further validates the strength of our region's technology and business talent.”

“Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau raises the bar on data analytics and visualisation for the entire CRM industry.  Microsoft has a strong Power Platform that includes Power BI, but eventually having analytics/visualisation more natively embedded within Salesforce CRM offers tremendous potential value and convenience to sellers, marketers, and general managers.”