Many of you know JibberJobber is a relationship management tool, designed off of traditional CRM, but stripped down to focus on RELATIONSHIPS instead of sales processes and jargon.

In the last almost-5-years I haven’t seen much news on the CRM front as far as aquisitions or anything.  Salesforce is the 8 billion pound guerrilla in the space, but I continue to hear they are way to complex and way too expensive (I’m sure they have their sweet spot in big companies, doing huge, huge deals).

Today I just read about two deals, though, which are pretty exciting.

The first is for GIST. I was actually on the phone with a GIST person a few months ago… I had tried to get in touch with them through their Contact Us methods but none of that worked. The phone call was okay.  The announcement of their acquisition by RIM (the company that puts out the Blackberry device) just came out yesterday.  No disclosure of how much the acquisition was for but according to TechCrunch they have taken in over $10M of funding… it’s said investors want a 10x return, which means they would have had to sold for $100M, but I’m guessing this deal was between $30M – $60M.  I have NOTHING to base that on, just a guess 🙂  No news on TechCrunch on this yet 🙂

The second is for Bantam, acquired by Constant Contact for $15M in cash. This is on TechCrunch here.  This is very interesting to me because it is a low purchase point, imo (even though, if they really did raise less than 2M, investors got about a 10x return (less what other owners got)), and because it was by Constant Contact.  My thoughts about CC doing this?  IT IS ABOUT TIME!  CRM is a great add-on for them.  iContact should follow suit and acquire their own CRM package, because this is so, so, so critical to their clientele.

As for me, I’m still plugging along, doing cool stuff with my CRM 🙂