This week, Salesforce.com acquired Entropysoft, a French Enterprise Content Management(ECM) system that was being used by IBM, Symanetc, IDS Sheer & over 25 US Vendors, according to Venturebeat’s Christina Farr, who broke the story. Since the announcement broke, the only evidence of which at the time was an updated LinkedIn profile, Salesforce.com has shut down the service, with entropysoft.com now only showing an acquisition announcement. There are, as of yet, no announcement details on acquisition amount, the future of Entropysoft for its clients and employees, though it seems so far that EntropySoft is no more.
http://t.co/h8aVprOM looks at content with French startup acquisition http://t.co/Znfa51tI
— Campfire PR (@PRCampfire) February 6, 2013
Some have speculated that Salesforce.com is looking to get into the ECM business; if so, EntropySoft and its French team were a great entry point.
Entropysoft pulled in around $3.5M in funding from Alven Capital, who has not yet commented on the announcement, which has become quite typical in the past years for European startups that are being acquired for less than respectable sums of money. We saw this previously with Sparrow’s acquisition, and the Wall Street Journal’s Ben Rooney recently wrote a great blog post about the double standard of exits in Europe vs. the US.
The team over at Entropysoft seems content with the acquisition for now, and there are no complaints from Alven Capital like we saw with Berrebi during the Sparrow acquisition, but I wouldn’t necessarily count this as a win for the French startup scene.