- Among a cache of Colin Powell emails released by hackers was a presentation prepared in May for the Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) board (on which sits Powell) titled "M&A Target Review."
- Partial presentation slides
- The 60-slide document identified 14 possible acquisition targets. Among them were Adobe Systems (NASDAQ:ADBE), whose market cap of $53.7B is above that of Salesforce, and Pegasystems (NASDAQ:PEGA), with a $2.3B valuation.
- The list also included Demandware, which Salesforce ended up buying, and LinkedIn, which the company lost in a bidding war with Microsoft.
- Others: Workday (NYSE:WDAY), ServiceNow (NYSE:NOW), NetSuite (NYSE:N), Tableau (NYSE:DATA), Veeva Systems (NYSE:VEEV), BOX, Zendesk (NYSE:ZEN), HubSpot (NYSE:HUBS).
- CEO Marc Benioff earlier this month when fending off complaints about his interest in Twitter: “We look at a lot of things and we pass on almost everything."