Salesforce.com announced Friday its acquisition of ExactTarget. ExactTarget was a cloud marketing platform used by Coca-Cola, Nike, Gap, and more than 6,000 other companies.

For Scott Dorsey, CEO of ExactTarget, "By bringing together ExactTarget's industry-leading marketing automation and campaign management capabilities with salesforce.com's leading social marketing solutions--listening with Radian 6, publishing with Buddy Media, and advertising with Social.com--we will deliver the marketing platform of choice for CMOs."

The transaction is in line with the mission of Salesforce.com of being the leading CRM platform in the world. The company wanted the platform to transform how companies connect with their customers in sales, service, and marketing. In addition, Salesforce.com aimed to create a marketing platform for email, social, web, and mobile.

According to Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, "The CMO is expected to spend more on technology than the CIO by 2017. The addition of ExactTarget makes Salesforce the starting place for every company and puts salesforce.com in the pole position to capture this opportunity."