Salesforce announced its agreement to acquire SteelBrick on December 23, 2015—not in a current transaction. The headline value was approximately $360 million in Salesforce stock, or about $300 million net of cash acquired and after considering Salesforce Ventures’ earlier investment. Salesforce completed the acquisition on February 1, 2016. SteelBrick’s technology became Salesforce SteelBrick CPQ, later forming part of Salesforce’s broader Revenue Cloud portfolio.
What Salesforce bought
SteelBrick was a cloud software company focused on quote-to-cash automation. Salesforce’s announcement described its platform as operating natively on Salesforce and automating the process from configuring products and generating quotes through configuring orders and collecting cash. The original announcement is documented in Salesforce’s December 2015 SEC filing.
CPQ and quote-to-cash are not the same thing
- CPQ means configure, price and quote: selecting valid product combinations, applying pricing and discount rules, and producing a customer quote.
- Quote-to-cash extends beyond the quote into orders, contracts, billing, payment collection and related revenue operations.
For example, a manufacturer might use the software to configure a machinery package, apply account-specific pricing, produce a quote, create the order, manage the contract and connect the transaction to invoicing and collection. SteelBrick was therefore more than a quoting plug-in.
Why Salesforce wanted SteelBrick
Salesforce had strong customer-relationship and opportunity-management software, but complex business-to-business sales also require product configuration, pricing controls, approvals, orders and downstream commercial processes. SteelBrick supplied a native CPQ capability instead of leaving Salesforce customers dependent on a separate partner for that part of the sales stack.
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- Sales teams could work with product, account and opportunity data already held in Salesforce.
- Salesforce could extend its platform from managing an opportunity to managing the commercial steps after a deal was agreed.
- The acquisition created cross-selling potential across Salesforce’s installed customer base.
- It gave Salesforce greater control over a strategically important part of enterprise selling and a foundation for broader revenue-management products.
Contemporary coverage described SteelBrick as filling Salesforce’s CPQ gap and noted that its software addressed pricing, orders, contracts, billing and payments. VentureBeat’s report also identified Apttus as a prominent Salesforce ecosystem CPQ partner at the time and noted SteelBrick chief executive Godard Abel’s previous leadership of BigMachines, which Oracle had acquired in 2013.
What the $360 million figure means
There are three figures readers commonly encounter. They describe different bases of measurement, so none should be presented without its qualification.
| Figure | What it represents |
|---|---|
| Approximately $360 million | Aggregate consideration announced on December 23, 2015, principally Salesforce common stock plus assumed equity awards. |
| Approximately $300 million | The announced value net of cash acquired, with Salesforce’s previous Salesforce Ventures investment reflected in the transaction description. |
| Approximately $314.8 million | Salesforce’s later acquisition-date fair-value accounting measurement. |
Salesforce’s fiscal 2018 Form 10-K reported the approximately $314.8 million accounting amount as $1.698 million of cash, $278.372 million of common stock, $10.989 million of assumed stock options and restricted awards, and $23.726 million for the fair value of a pre-existing relationship with SteelBrick. See the Form 10-K disclosure.
That is why “Salesforce paid $360 million” is acceptable only as shorthand for the announced transaction consideration. It was not necessarily an independent valuation of SteelBrick, and the deal was not simply an all-cash purchase.
Timeline: announcement to closing
- December 23, 2015: Salesforce announced a definitive agreement to acquire SteelBrick and said it expected the transaction to close in its fiscal first quarter ending April 30, 2016.
- February 1, 2016: The acquisition closed.
- February 2, 2016: Salesforce announced that the product had become Salesforce SteelBrick CPQ and was being incorporated into Sales Cloud. The closing and product integration were confirmed in Salesforce’s release.
What happened to SteelBrick’s product
SteelBrick stopped being an independent vendor. Its immediate post-acquisition identity was Salesforce SteelBrick CPQ within Sales Cloud. Later Salesforce product and market materials place Salesforce CPQ within Revenue Cloud and trace that product lineage to the SteelBrick acquisition; an IDC assessment published in 2025 describes that relationship.
Revenue Cloud is a later portfolio context, not the name Salesforce used immediately at closing. Current Salesforce materials also distinguish Salesforce CPQ from Salesforce Industries CPQ, so customers should verify today’s editions, packaging and migration options rather than assume the 2015 product name remains available.
What Salesforce’s accounting says it acquired
Salesforce’s acquisition accounting assigned approximately $30.7 million to developed technology with a four-year useful life, $17.11 million to customer relationships with a seven-year useful life, and $1.35 million to other purchased intangible assets with a one-year useful life. The filing said goodwill primarily reflected the assembled workforce and expanded market opportunities from combining SteelBrick’s technology with Salesforce’s offerings. The details appear in Salesforce’s acquisition accounting disclosure.
Salesforce also said SteelBrick’s financial results were not material at that point in its early post-acquisition reporting. The strategic value was therefore the product, engineering team, customer relationships and platform position—not a large immediate contribution to Salesforce revenue.
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Competitive context in 2015
The deal occurred in an enterprise configure-price-quote market where Salesforce customers commonly used ecosystem partners such as Apttus, while Oracle had its BigMachines CPQ business. Those companies were period-specific competitors and ecosystem options; the acquisition did not eliminate third-party CPQ competition. Current Salesforce market materials continue to identify multiple CPQ approaches, including Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce Industries CPQ.
What the acquisition means for buyers today
Potential advantages
- Native access to Salesforce accounts, opportunities, products and customer data.
- Tighter handoffs from selling to ordering and other revenue operations.
- A single platform and partner ecosystem for organizations already standardized on Salesforce.
Important limitations
- Complex bundles, subscriptions, usage pricing, amendments and renewals can require substantial implementation and consulting work.
- Platform concentration increases dependence on Salesforce’s data model, roadmap, licensing and partners.
- CPQ or Revenue Cloud does not automatically replace an ERP, tax engine, payment processor, accounts-receivable system or revenue-recognition platform.
- Businesses with simple products and flat pricing may not need enterprise CPQ.
- Organizations centered on SAP, Oracle, Microsoft or another CRM/ERP stack should compare integration costs rather than assume a Salesforce-native product is the best fit.
Existing SteelBrick customers should map the historical SteelBrick name to current Salesforce CPQ and Revenue Cloud documentation, then confirm supported functionality, commercial terms and any required migration with Salesforce.
The Bottom Line
Salesforce’s SteelBrick purchase was a strategic platform acquisition announced in 2015 and closed in 2016. The $360 million headline refers to announced aggregate consideration; the announcement also gave an approximately $300 million net-of-cash figure, while Salesforce later recorded approximately $314.8 million of acquisition-date fair-value consideration. SteelBrick’s technology became Salesforce CPQ and now sits within the broader Revenue Cloud lineage.
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