Customer relationship management software giant Salesforce.com Inc. said today it will buy ClickSoftware Technologies Ltd. for $1.35 billion in cash and stock.

ClickSoftware sells what’s called field service software, which is used to keep track of company employees that perform maintenance tasks and provide other services “out in the field” for customers.

Salesforce already sells its own tools for keeping track of field workers via its Salesforce Field Service Lightning product, which is built on its Service Cloud offering. The idea is to combine that platform with ClickSoftware’s capabilities to create a more fully featured product.

“Salesforce Field Service Lightning… harnesses the latest in dispatching, mobile workforce empowerment and IoT technologies to empower companies to connect their entire service workforce on a single, centralized platform,” Salesforce said in a statement. “With the combined capabilities of Field Service Lightning and ClickSoftware, Salesforce will be positioned to lead the way to the future of field service.”

The acquisition will help Salesforce compete with its rival Microsoft Corp., which entered the field service software market in 2015 when it acquired a company called FieldOne Systems LLC.

Salesforce and ClickSoftware had already integrated their products prior to the acquisition. As the company explained, “With ClickSoftware and Field Service Lightning, if a mobile employee gets delayed by traffic, a dispatcher can quickly route another field technician to the job so the customer’s appointment does not get delayed. These interactions are then automatically updated across the entire Salesforce platform to allow customers, sales, customer service and field service to have complete visibility.”

“Salesforce never had the very specific detailed capabilities needed for technical field service, which ClickForce has built and grown on,” said Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research Inc. “Salesforce is not only buying complimentary technology and capabilities, but has also taken out a key competitor. It may now be encroaching the 33% mark for acquired, inorganic revenue but it has to find ways to integrate these new offerings. It has the Mulesoft integration platform to do that, but at the same time the core Salesforce products are being re-platformed for AWS. So a lot going on at Salesforce and a lot has to go right in the next 2-3 years.”

ClickForce, which is led by its Chief Executive Officer Mark Cattini, was founded in 1997 and has 829 employees, according to its listing on LinkedIn.

Today’s deal comes about two months after Salesforce acquired Tableau Software Inc. for $15.7 billion, which was the biggest acquisition in its history.

Photo: Sukanta Manna/Flickr