Salesforce acquires Tableau as buying spree continues.

Tableau is latest addition to tech giant’s growing acquisition menu

Salesforce surprised investors Monday with the news it had agreed to buy Seattle analytics software company Tableau for $15.7 billion. The San Francisco business software company, which recently marked its 20th anniversary, has bought more than 60 companies as it expanded from its original business of tracking customer contacts and sales.

Wall Street didn’t love the price Salesforce paid for Tableau, knocking 5% off of Salesforce shares Monday. But it’s clear Salesforce needs to keep buying companies. Some of its biggest product lines, like marketing software, productivity tools, analytics and cloud computing, stem from acquisitions.

And Microsoft, Oracle and Google, Salesforce’s

rivals in cloud computing — the vast field that embraces the shift of applications and storage to remote, internet-connected servers — are eager to snap up anything Salesforce doesn’t buy. The biggest Salesforce deal of all might be the one that got away: After Microsoft spent $26 billion to buy LinkedIn in 2016, Salesforce cofounder Marc Benioff told analysts he would have been willing to spend more to get his hands on the professional networking site’s data.

Here are some of Salesforce’s most notable acquisitions over the years:

Heroku, December 2010, $212 million: Before this deal, Salesforce offered its own cloud apps. Buying Heroku put it in the business of providing developers, particularly smaller ones, with the technical underpinning to run their own apps without having to buy and configure servers in the cloud.

Buddy Media, June 2012, $689 million: As Facebook and Twitter rose in importance, so did tools to manage businesses’ social media presences. Salesforce bought the New York company at a time when it and Oracle were in an arms race for social marketing software.

ExactTarget, June 2013, $2.5 billion: This deal expanded Salesforce’s reach in managing email, online and social marketing campaigns. It also gave it a major presence in Indiana, which would spur Benioff to organize a boycott of the state in 2015 after thenGov. Mike Pence signed a law that allowed businesses to discriminate against LGBT people. The state Legislature backed down and softened the bill’s language.

Demandware, July 2016, $2.8 billion: As more and more purchasing moved online, Salesforce bought this Massachusetts company to expand into e-commerce.

Quip, August 2016, $412 million: Quip makes document-editing tools that are similar to Google Docs or Microsoft’s online offerings, but they are particularly adapted to real-time collaboration and mobile interfaces. More importantly, Quip was founded by former Facebook chief technology officer Bret Taylor, who later became Salesforce’s president and chief product officer.

MuleSoft, March 2018, $6.5 billion: This San Francisco software company makes tools for integrating software from different companies. Notably, the acquisition pushed Salesforce’s number of employees in its hometown past Wells Fargo’s, making it the city’s largest private employer.

Salesforce.org, April 2019, $300 million: This one may seem like a head-scratcher, but as Salesforce’s philanthropic arm, Salesforce.org ran as a separate entity that sold Salesforce software to nonprofits and educational institutions, helping finance Salesforce’s nonprofit foundation. With this deal, which saw $300 million go to the Salesforce Foundation, Salesforce took its estimated $150 million to $200 million in annual sales to the nonprofit and educational sectors in-house, in a more standard corporate configuration.

Tableau, June 2019, $15.7 billion: All of Salesforce’s apps generate vast amounts of data. Tableau’s software helps visualize data as graphs, maps and charts, making them easier to interpret. It’s a hot sector: Google just paid $2.6 billion for Santa Cruz analytics software company Looker.