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When Salesforce purchased Quip last summer<\/a>\u00a0for $750 million, it seemed on its face to be an unusual acquisition for the cloud CRM company. Salesforce tends to concentrate\u00a0on\u00a0more vertical targets.<\/p>\n In fact, at a press conference this week at Dreamforce, Salesforce president, vice chairman and COO \u2014 yes, he has all those titles<\/a> \u2014 said when asked about the company\u2019s acquisition strategy, \u201cWe go very hard into vertical markets.\u201d\u00a0He then used the company\u2019s $2.8 billion Demandware purchase as a prime example<\/a> of this approach.<\/p>\n Quip is the opposite. It\u2019s a productivity app, designed to be mobile first, and which builds in collaboration and communication right at the document level. Quip founder and CEO Bret Taylor said\u00a0they really wanted to put the communication component front and center when they were first designing the app.<\/p>\n Block has said in the past that when it comes to acquisitions, his company is always looking for better ways to serve the customer \u2014 theirs and those of their users. He admits Quip\u00a0may not seem obvious as a product that serves the customer, but it\u2019s about productivity and that\u2019s something\u00a0could touch every part of the Salesforce platform.<\/p>\n \u201cQuip is very compelling. Some people think it\u2019s an unorthodox acquisition, but it\u2019s in the context of driving productivity for customers,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Taylor unsurprisingly agrees. \u201cOne way to think about it is that a lot of their products are\u00a0vertical. Productivity is horizontal. Ours is a separate product and can integrate into all the Salesforce products,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n There was also a good cultural match and Salesforce liked the Quip team, a point that Block says the company looks at very closely when making acquisition decisions.<\/p>\n When Quip was sold, it came as a bit of a surprise, but Taylor\u00a0said he and his team saw an opportunity to reach a scale that would have taken years on their own. He points to the scope of the Dreamforce conference as a prime example of the reach of Salesforce. The company boasted that 175,000 people registered for the event. It\u2019s doubtful that many showed up, but even so it\u2019s an enormous event and Quip had a big presence here, which wouldn\u2019t have been possible\u00a0before the acquisition.<\/p>\n The idea of a deeper relationship began shortly after Quip agreed to build a Salesforce Lightning module earlier this year. It didn\u2019t take long for the discussions to advance beyond that and they began to talk about something deeper. It didn\u2019t hurt that Taylor and Salesforce CEO and chairman Marc Benioff have known each other for a long time, and that really helped advance the discussion.<\/p>\n At Dreamforce, Quip announced some direct integrations with Salesforce including (as you would expect) single sign-on and the previously mentioned Lightning module to\u00a0enable users\u00a0to link, access and create Quip documents, spreadsheets and task lists inside of Salesforce. Finally, it includes what they are calling \u201crich mentions.\u201d These are live Salesforce fields that live inside Quip documents, so if you drag\u00a0closed deal data into your document, it will update automatically each time the deal data info changes in Salesforce.<\/p>\n For those who aren\u2019t interested in Salesforce, Quip is still available as a stand-alone product, and in fact continues to operate as a separate company within the larger entity. But\u00a0it\u2019s clear that the integrations announced this week at Dreamforce are\u00a0only the beginning of what we will see in the future, and Quip is very much an important part of the Salesforce product family \u2014 even if it might seem like an atypical one.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"quip-screen\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/RSSPoster_PRO\/cache\/5c8f1_quip-screen.png?resize=580%2C326\")
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