eWeek reports that Salesforce.com has acquired both security vendor Navajo Systems and hosted help desk vendor Assistly. The Navajo Systems website confirms that the company has been acquired by Salesforce.com, but the two companies aren’t making statements about the acquisition yet. Navajo Systems sells a service for encrypting data stored in Salesforce.com.

Assistly

Assistly offers a hosted help desk and social media monitoring tool. It recently launched version 2.0 of its product, revamping the user interface and adding a freemium pricing model.

Salesforce.com already offers help desk products in the form of its Service Cloud and RemedyForce services. It also acquired social media monitoring and analytics product Radian6 earlier this year. If eWeek is right about this acquisition, could Salesforce.com be planning to replace Service Cloud with Assistly and swap-out Assistly’s monitoring tools with Radian6?

Navajo Systems

According to Dark Reading, a security focused site, Navajo took its website down last week and put up a notice that “Navajo Systems has decided to pursue a different strategy.”

Last year Navajo Systems announced a service it called a “virtual private software-as-a-service” Salesforce.com It sounds like a private or on-premise version of Salesforce.com, but it was actually a play on the term “virtual private network.” The company offering a service for encrypting data stored in Salesforce.com so that even if someone had access to your account, they still wouldn’t be able to access your data. A PDF detailing the solution is still available on the site. Navajo Systems also had partnerships with other companies, including IBM, to provide cloud encryption.

Services Angle

I’m not sure yet what to think about the Assistly acquisition, given that Salesforce.com already owns comparable technology. But the Navajo Systems acquisition makes sense if Salesforce.com is trying to address security concerns some companies may have with migrating data to the cloud. However, as Dark Reading points out, how the encryption keys is managed is important. If Salesforce.com is encrypting the data, storing the data and storing the keys, the service should probably not be seen as secure.