Salesforce.com announced yesterday afternoon that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Rypple, a Toronto-based provider of cloud-based social performance management capabilities to enterprises, by April 30, 2012. The intended acquisition gives Salesforce.com a toehold in the Human Capital Management (HCM) space, as well as further diversification from its roots as a vendor of cloud-based CRM services. Salesforce.com's anticipated integration of Rypple and Chatter should make pure-play enterprise social software vendors shudder, as it will further demonstrate how the integration of status updates and activity streams into digitized, people-centric business processes can be packaged for sale to buyers in a specific corporate role or function, rather than to the ephemeral potential purchaser known as "the business". This acquisition, in combination with SAP's buyout of SuccessFactors (and the functionality from its Cubetree acquisition) may be seen, in hindsight, as the tipping point for rapid consolidation of the market for enterprise social software.
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