Salesforce paid $1.9 billion in cash to buy Own Company, a data management and security software company based in New Jersey
Since it paid $27.7 billion for Slack in 2021, Own is Salesforce’s biggest deal. It was said that the company thought about buying the data management software company Informatica earlier this year but, in the end, chose not to.
Manager of Sales at Salesforce, Steve Fisher, said in a press release that the purchase “underscores [Salesforce’s] commitment to providing secure, end-to-end solutions that protect our customers’ most valuable data.”
“Data security has never been more important,” Fisher said. “Own’s proven expertise and products will help us give our customers better data protection and management solutions.”
Own was founded in 2015 as OwnBackup but changed its name in October last year. The company offers a variety of data backup tools and services for businesses, such as automated backup and emergency recovery.
The original plan was to use the open APIs of software-as-a-service providers, like Salesforce’s, to get data from a company’s apps and back it up. In addition to Salesforce apps, you can also own compatible AWS and Microsoft SaaS apps.
Ariel Berkman, Daniel Gershuni, and Eran Cohen started own. Before today’s buyout, it raised $507.3 million from investors such as Tiger Global, BlackRock, Insight Partners, Vertex Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures.
Own had a value of $3.35 billion in August 2021.
That’s a lot of money, but the huge size of the data backup and restore market might make it worth it. The world data backup and recovery market was worth $12.9 billion in 2023, according to market research company KBV Research. It grew at a rate of 10.9% per year from 2017 to 2023.
There are many reasons for the growth.
Businesses are facing more and more threats from viruses. Some disasters can happen in data centers, like the fire at OVH in France in 2021 that lost a lot of data. Some countries are enacting data management rules like the EU AI Act. Many of these rules are very strict about how long data must be kept and where it originated.
Today, Own has around 7,000 customers and a lot of workers. The company now offers a wide range of data storage, seeding, security, and analytics services that are much more advanced than its first product. According to CEO Sam Gutmann, Own will “enable Salesforce to offer a more comprehensive data protection and loss prevention set of products” that will work with Salesforce’s current data management tools.
That would be a natural step forward for Own. As my coworker Ron Miller wrote before, the Salesforce environment makes up most of the company’s backup and recovery business.
Gutmann said, “We’re excited to work with Salesforce, a company that shares our dedication to data defense and resilience.” “By driving innovation, protecting data, and ensuring compliance in the world’s most complex and highly regulated industries, together with Salesforce, we’ll give our customers even more value.”
Salesforce thinks the deal will go through in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2025 if the government approves it and other customary closing conditions are met.
Due to pressure from activist investors, Salesforce said it would stop making big deals a year ago. Own could very well mean that the company is returning to big acquisitions. (In fact, it got rid of its M&A group.) In the past few weeks, Salesforce has made a few smaller acquisitions. It bought the omnichannel shopping platform PredictSpring and the AI-powered voice agents company Tenyx.
