Manymoon, a social productivity suite for businesses, announced Tuesday that it has been acquired by Salesforce. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.Designed to streamline business operations, Manymoon lets clients share events, documents, schedules and more with colleagues. No matter which plan one chooses, a Manymoon client can add unlimited users and projects, but the bare bones free version comes with just 25 MB of storage. Manymoon also offers three paid plans ($19, $29 or $49 per month, or cheaper by the year) that include 10 GB, 25 GB and 100 GB of storage space, respectively, along with increasing customizability and management options.
Since launching on three major platforms–the Google Apps Marketplace, LinkedIn and the Google Chrome Web Store–Manymoon says it has accumulated over 50,000 business clients.
Thankfully for current Manymoon users, the company doesn’t plan to change much under Salesforce’s ownership:
We’ll still be the Manymoon that helps you get work done. The Manymoon team will remain intact and will operate as a separate business within salesforce.com so we can continue our focus on building a great social app that makes our customers more productive and successful every day.
Salesforce will help Manymoon with “scalability, security, performance and support,” and Manymoon gets on the fast track to Salesforce’s client base.
The acquisition of Manymoon by a company as respected as Salesforce, universally accepted to be one of the forerunners of cloud computing, could spark wider industry adoption of productivity services for business that look to consumer-targeted social products for inspiration. One developer of a task-oriented productivity platform, Cohuman, just raised a new $600,000 round of funding last week. Like Manymoon, Cohuman has acquired many users through the Google Apps Marketplace, Cohuman CEO Matt Work tells me.
Salesforce has been no stranger to the startup world. In late December, the cloud company acquired Etacts, an email management platform for people who handle large volumes of email on a daily basis. Two weeks earlier, the company had paid $212 million in cash for Heroku, a cloud platform for writing Ruby-based applications. Both Heroku and Etacts were incubated by Y Combinator. Earlier in 2010, Salesforce had paid $142 million in cash for Jigsaw, a crowd-sourced business contacts database.
More recently, Salesforce contributed to Seesmic’s $4 million round announced yesterday.
