Salesforce buys Quip for $582m in direct challenge to Microsoft Office 365

Salesforce to take on Microsoft and Google with Quip cloud collaboration purchase

Salesforce.com has fleshed out its cloud offerings still further with a $582m deal to buy cloud collaborative office suite company Quip in a direct challenge to Microsoft's Office 365 and Google Docs.

Quip's cloud service is intended to enable teams to work together on documents, including plans, spreadsheets, word processing, images and task lists. It also features chat channels, contextual chat, inline commenting, permissions, and real-time updates, and has an offline mode enabling individuals to work away from network access. Customers include tech firm New Relic.

Salesforce had invested in Quip as a start-up and already had a substantial stake in the company, putting it in pole position to complete any acquisition, should CEO Marc Benioff choose to swoop. It raised some $45m in venture funding with other investors - in addition to Benioff and Salesforce Ventures - including venture capital groups Benchmark and Greylock, as well as individual investors Yuri Milner and Peter Fenton.

Co-founder and CEO Bret Taylor will remain at the helm of the company for the time being, although the company's technology will almost certainly be integrated into Salesforce.com, and cross-sold to Salesforce's existing customers.

"Salesforce and Quip share the same philosophy about software: it should be in the cloud, built for the mobile era, and be inherently social. Salesforce pioneered the shift to enterprise cloud computing, and Quip has been working since 2012 to reimagine a productivity platform for teams that allows them to be more connected, more collaborative and get more work done," wrote Taylor and co-founder Kevin Gibbs in a blog posting.

The acquisition comes just one week after Oracle finally scooped up NetSuite, arguably Salesforce's closest competitor, for $9.3bn. The various acquisitions that cloud and software giants are making are rapidly re-shaping both landscapes, with blocs emerging that look likely to dominate computing for the foreseeable future.

Quip was co-founded by ex-Facebook chief technology officer Bret Taylor - also the co-creator of Google Maps and the Google Maps API - and Kevin Gibbs, also formerly at Google, and one of the creators of Google Suggest and the Google App Engine.

Taylor had joined Facebook in 2009 when FriendFeed, the company he was CEO of, was acquired by Facebook for $50m. He left in 2012 to found Quip, which emerged from ‘stealth' mode in July 2013. Taylor was also appointed to the board of directors of Twitter in July.