We were just finishing up a post about Oracle’s acquisition plans when the news comes in that Salesforce.com has acquired Activa Live, a SaaS messaging platform designed for customer support through a chat environment.
This is an interesting acquisition and shows what a heated space it is for providing more capabilities to tie customer support environments to the social Web.
It clearly shows that Salesforce.com is putting its investing strength into technologies that enhance the social layer with real-time communcations.
On its web site, Activa Live calls itself the “leading provider of enterprise level live chat software that is fully available online – from the cloud.”
Clients include American Apparel, Proctor&Gamble and Turner Broadcast.
The service features include live chat, analytics and perhaps not surprisingly, integration with Salesforce.com. Other features include audio alerts so support knows when customers want to chat. Visual cues indicate different customer requests. The service is designed so the support agent may chat in two-way or multiple-perso chats.
According to an Adobe success story, Activa is built on Adobe Flex 2 and PHP:
Activa Live Chat provides web operators a rich interface integrated with PHP services for event-driven activities–such as managing chat between customers and operators–and for query-response relationships that include requests made to Yahoo! Maps and Salesforce.com services. “Our development focused on strict implementation of the Model-View-Controller design pattern,” explains Andy Lintner, director of application development. “This made integrating our Flex interface with PHP easy. Passing data to the interface is as simple as generating HTML on the server.”
Activa competed with a number of live chat providers such as BoldChat and LivePerson.
For its part, Salesforce.com will compete with services such as RightNow, which recently launched a support integration with Facebook.
