Salesforce buys Coolan to help keep its data centres running

Salesforce has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire data analysis specialist Coolan, following numerous data centre outages in recent months.

Coolan has developed software for analysing data about data centre hardware, which helps organizations monitor performance to predict server failure, reduce downtime, and lower the cost of infrastructure. The announcement was made by Coolan Co-founder Amir Michael on the company’s blog and marks a productive couple of weeks for the CRM giant, after agreeing a deal to acquire e-Commerce specialist Demandware for $2.8 billion earlier this month.

“Building a start-up is an awesome journey, and I’m incredibly proud of the work we’ve done,” said Michael. “Once the transaction has closed, the Coolan team will help Salesforce optimize its infrastructure as it scales to support customer growth around the world. I will continue my work with the Open Compute Project (OCP) to further its mission of making hardware open, efficient and scalable.”

The acquisition comes at an appropriate time as the last few months have seen numerous data centre incidents which have bruised the reputations of some of the industry’s leading names. This week, BT experienced difficulties which have been linked to various incidents in partner’s data centres, bad weather conditions downed AWS in Australia last month, Apple’s customers lost cloud-services for seven hours and Google lost connectivity for 18 minutes in April.

Salesforce has also seen problems within its own data centres, and subsequently made the decision to run some of its core services on AWS in various international markets. Although the decision to outsource to AWS could be seen as a failsafe should the company experience any challenges in its own data centres, incorporating Coolan would appear to be a move to bolster its own defences and avoid any future incidents.