Salesforce.com officially announced today its acquisition of Indian web conferencing company Dimdim for approximately $31 million in cash. We reported rumors that Salesforce.com would acquire Dimdim in November, but this is the first confirmation we’ve seen from either company. As expected, Salesforce.com will integrate DimDdm’s features into Chatter.
The Dimdim web site now allows only existing customers to login, with a note that new registrations are not being accepted. The open source community edition is still available for download from Sourceforge. Update: Dimdim users are reporting that free accounts are being shut down:
Dimdim offered an “open core” web conferencing product. It offered a stripped down open source version for free and made its money by selling its hosted version, which contained extra features.
As we pointed out in November, web conferencing has been heating up. Nefsis launched a free version of its web conferencing service, Adobe released an updated version of Adobe Connect and Skype has been upping its enterprise ante by releasing Skype Connect and hiring former Cisco executive Tony Bates.
Salesforce.com has been on an acquisition streak. In 2010 it acquired: Jigsaw, Sitemasher, Activa Live Chat, Heroku and Etacts.
For a trip down memory lane, here’s our Co-Editor and VP of Content Development Marshall Kirkpatrick’s coverage of Dimdim’s launch in 2006 at TechCrunch.