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Why Salesforce Bought Coolan, a Data Center Optimization Startup

Salesforce bought Coolan for data-center analytics and hardware expertise intended to help optimize its infrastructure as customer demand grew.
From TheFinanceBase Team3 min to read
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Salesforce bought Coolan to bring data-center analytics expertise and an experienced hardware team inside the company. Coolan’s team was expected to help Salesforce optimize the infrastructure supporting its growth—not, based on the public statements, to launch a new product for Salesforce customers.

What happened in the acquisition

Coolan announced the acquisition in July 2016. Salesforce later confirmed that the deal closed in August. The companies did not disclose the purchase price or other deal terms in the contemporaneous coverage. Salesforce said nine Coolan employees joined through acquisitions, including Coolan; its equity-award announcement grouped those employees with hires from Demandware and Quip rather than giving Coolan-specific award totals. Data Center Knowledge reported the announcement, and Salesforce confirmed the closing and employee awards.

What Coolan’s technology did

Coolan was described as a cloud-based analytics service for data-center hardware fleets. It combined operational and historical data, including machine-learning methods, to help infrastructure teams understand component reliability, failures, power configuration, and equipment life cycles. The practical questions included when a server should be retired and which power-supply type or configuration would operate most efficiently. Contemporaneous coverage described Coolan’s use cases.

That kind of information can matter financially as well as operationally. Better fleet visibility can help inform maintenance, uptime planning, energy use, hardware purchasing, and decisions about whether to keep or replace equipment. One example reported by Data Center Knowledge was an unnamed customer with 1,600 servers: Coolan identified over-provisioned power supplies associated with an estimated 300,000 kWh of wasted data-center energy per year. This was a single customer’s reported estimate, not a Salesforce result or a typical savings guarantee.

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Why Salesforce wanted the team

Coolan co-founder Amir Michael said the team would help Salesforce “optimize its infrastructure as it scales to support customer growth around the world.” That statement points to the central rationale: as demand for Salesforce services increased, the company wanted better analytics and hardware expertise to operate its infrastructure effectively. Data Center Knowledge reproduced Michael’s explanation.

The deal therefore makes more sense as an infrastructure investment than as a generic bet on artificial intelligence. Analytics could help Salesforce make informed choices about reliability, capacity, energy, and hardware life cycles across a large fleet. The sources establish the intended role of Coolan’s team, but do not quantify the acquisition’s eventual financial return.

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How the purchase fit Salesforce’s AWS plans

The acquisition did not contradict Salesforce’s move toward public cloud. In May 2016, Salesforce named AWS its preferred public-cloud infrastructure provider for planned international expansion, saying AWS would help it bring infrastructure online more quickly in those markets and would support core services. AWS’s announcement explains that arrangement.

Contemporary reporting also described Salesforce as continuing to invest in and operate its own data centers while expanding its AWS relationship. The evidence supports a mixed infrastructure strategy: use AWS for parts of the expansion while improving the systems Salesforce operated itself. It does not show that Salesforce rejected public cloud or intended to build all of its infrastructure independently.

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What later Salesforce engineering writing does—and does not—show

In a 2019 engineering article, Salesforce author Conan Yang described data-center operations as a feedback loop: improve data coverage and quality, correlate and make information timely, then apply smarter tools such as machine triage and self-healing automation. Yang summarized the goal as improving “the trust, agility, and cost of data center operations.” The article sets out Salesforce’s broader data-driven operations approach.

This later account helps explain why infrastructure telemetry and analytics are useful, but it does not identify those later systems as Coolan products or credit Coolan alone with building them. Public contemporaneous reporting also left open whether Salesforce planned to commercialize Coolan’s platform for outside customers. The available sources do not establish whether Coolan continued as a standalone service, was retired, or directly supplied Salesforce’s later tools.

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