They've been making inroads into the marketing side of things for a while now with their acquisition of Buddy Media, ExactTarget, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org

They've been making inroads into the marketing side of things for a while now with their acquisition of Buddy Media, ExactTarget, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce_Marketing_Cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce_Marketing_Cloud All the big analytics/ad tech/ESP players are trying to own this space, and unfortunately none of them do it very well because it is largely bolt-ons of various products cobbled together into a frankenstein "marketing cloud" that they can then charge ridiculous enterprise services fees to setup and maintain, and has tons of vendor lock-in (the real long-term play). Personally, while there are advantages to consolidating in some cases (the DoubleClick search/display stack works well for many as one example), I worry that many of these companies are losing focus on their core competency as a result.