Salesforce is taking great strides to leap forward into the technology domain of machine learning and big data analytics to improvise SalesforceIQ, Salesforce’s own machine learning for in-house as well as Salesforce customer products and enhance intelligence across the Salesforce clouds. One such step is the acquisition of a startup based out of Palo Alto, PredictionIO. PredictionIO has developed an open-source machine learning server.
The news broke out and spread after the blog post by CEO and co-founder of PredictionIO, Simon Chan stating the definitive agreement between Salesforce and PredictionIO. Chan also noted in his blog post that their current team will be joining the Salesforce after the transaction closes. The team involves other co-founders Donald Szeto, Thomas Stone and Kenneth Chan.
Founded in 2012 in London, the company was originally called TappingStone, built a product which startup described as “Machine Learning as a Service” before transferring to an open source model. During announcement of $2.5 million seed round in 2014, Steve described PredictionIO as MySQL for machine learning. The affordability and faster speed of development in building machine learning based products like recommendation or prediction engines was made possible by open source and free tech product by the company.
The project has now grown to a community of more than 8,000 developers powering more than 400 apps. In his blog post Simon quoted that,
“PredictionIO’s open source technology will remain open source and free for all users. The team will continue to work on evolving the project into a self-sustaining community. We’re also reducing the PredictionIO Cluster software fee on AWS Cloudformation to $0 for the first time.”
He also went on to add about what PredictionIO will do in Salesforce:
“At Salesforce, PredictionIO’s innovative machine learning platform will extend SalesforceIQ’s machine learning capabilities and enhance intelligence across the Salesforce clouds. Being a part of Salesforce will give us an amazing opportunity to continue building our open source machine learning platform on a much larger scale, with the world’s #1 CRM company.”
Including this acquisition of PredictionIO, Salesforce has reached to a count of thirty six acquisitions. Salesforce has already made several other acquisitions in machine learning and big data analytics, including most recent MinHash. Some other major recent acquisitions are customer relationship platform RelateIQ for $390 million in 2014, Tempo AI (smart calendar startup). RelateIQ has now become the backbone of SalesforceIQ. This clearly indicates that Salesforce is taking the big data analytics and machine learning to a whole new level in the work of customer relationship management systems, which for sure will open new avenues for its customers and third party developers.