Salesforce.com’s definitive agreement to acquire MuleSoft for approximately $6.5 billion represents the company’s biggest acquisition yet and a calculated move to consolidate it’s position as the leading enterprise software company in the Cloud.

The move also illustrates that the real power in the market is quickly shifting to those vendors that can facilitate the most cost-effective flow of data across applications in an increasingly connected and complex world.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ analysis in Datamation of the key market drivers that have led Salesforce to make this strategic move and what it means for the rest of the enterprise software industry.

Now that cloud computing has made it economically feasible to capture and collate large volumes of data — that is, “big data” — many organizations are trying to find an equally economical method to analyze and move the data across various business applications.

The rapidly escalating demands for powerful analytic tools to decipher the meaning of old and new data streams are driving many organizations to invest millions of dollars in data scientists and expensive consulting services.

Click here to read my latest blogpost in E-Commerce Times which describes how two cloud-based companies, Algorithmia and Bedrock Data, are offering online marketplaces to remedy these age-old issues.