UPDATED 11:52 EDT / FEBRUARY 02 2017

CLOUD

Salesforce.com buys creative agency Sequence to bolster its UX chops

A month into 2017, Salesforce.com Inc. has already made its first acquisition of the year.

The company on the other end of the deal wasn’t a startup like most of the cloud giant’s recent acquisitions, but rather an 11-year-old creative agency called Sequence. Roy Jojo, the firm’s chief executive, broke the news in a blog post last week that Salesforce.com only brought to the attention of the public this Wednesday, the day the deal was completed.

Sequence carved out a niche for itself by providing digital design services to Fortune 500 companies. Apple Inc., L’Oréal S.A. and The Walt Disney Company are three of the dozens of major brands that have drawn on the firm’s expertise over the years as part of internal projects. It has also worked with a few government agencies along the way to help modernize their digital operations.

The acquisition of Sequence will bolster Salesforce.com’s low-key but important Experience Design group, which provides development services to brands that want to spin up custom applications on its cloud. It’s a major boon for organizations that don’t have a lot of in-house technical talent or simply aren’t familiar with the platform and don’t wish to sink time into learning the ropes.

The easier Salesforce.com can make it for customers to deploy applications, the broader its platform’s appeal should become. The company didn’t specify exactly what part Sequence will play into this effort, but there’s some room for speculation. The fact that the firm’s website is still up even though the deal has already closed suggests it will continue to operate as an independent unit rather than simply get folded into the Experience Design group. This is seemingly reaffirmed by the appearance of the line “A Salesforce company” below its logo.

Looking ahead, the cloud giant can be expected to announce many more such strategic acquisitions in 2017. John Somorjai, the head of corporate development at Salesforce.com, told Fortune last year that his team is especially keen to make deals in artificial intelligence. The company has already picked up six machine learning startups over the past couple of years as part of this buying spree.

Image courtesy of Salesforce.com

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU