Salesforce Snaps up MapAnything as Location of Things Market Heats up
One of the fastest growing enterprise software companies of all time – Salesforce – is acquiring Location of Things platform MapAnything, which is built natively on Salesforce’s AppExchange.
The software, which employs location-based intelligence, is used by nearly 2000 customers including big names like American Express and Lyft, for applications like improving the productivity of field sales professionals by optimising territories, and visualising vehicles’ geographic whereabouts to automatically trigger location-based work orders.
Given the close relationship between the two companies, the buyout could easily have been predicted – MapAnything is already a Salesforce Partner, and its products have long been available through Salesforce’s AppExchange store.
With MapAnything fully under its control, Salesforce will be uniquely positioned to help its customers innovate and improve efficiency with market-leading location-based intelligence solutions:
“The Location market is expanding rapidly, and the addition of MapAnything to Salesforce will help the world’s leading brands accurately plan: how many people they need, where to put them, how to make them as productive as possible, how to track what’s being done in real time and what they can learn to improve going forward” explained MapAnything CEO and cofounder John Stewart in a blog post.
A subsector of the booming Internet of Things (IoT), the Location of Things market is expected to exhibit significant growth over the next few years, with one report suggesting that It could achieve a CAGR of 34.07% and reach $71.6B by 2025.
Increased mobile device adoption, and the rise in popularity of apps like Uber and Google Maps that rely on tapping geo-location data, are helping to drive this growth, along with marketing solutions like Salesforce that seek to gain a competitive edge by providing location-aware customer experiences.
Led by tech giants like Google and Salesforce, companies are increasingly undertaking mergers and acquisitions in this field to help develop new Location of Things products and services.
