The all-stock deal is Salesforce’s largest-ever acquisition. The tech giant is offering US$177.88 a share, 42 per cent more than the Friday closing price of Tableau’s stock. Marc Benioff, Salesforce co-CEO, also said the company will make Seattle its official second headquarters. (Reuters, TechCrunch)

Talking point: Salesforce will now be able to help its enterprise customers’ employees make better use of the large amounts of information they collect while dealing with their own clients. The deal also puts Salesforce in even more direct competition with Redmond, Wash.-headquartered Microsoft, both geographically and business-wise. Tableau’s data-visualization and-analysis tools compete with Microsoft’s Power BI, a business intelligence platform. It’s a lucrative market—big data and analytics solutions will be worth US$260 billion by 2022, according to International Data Corp., a research firm. Microsoft previously beat Salesforce to the acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016; the professional social network has since added customer relationship management tools, making it an alternative to Salesforce’s core product.