Salesforce to predict the future with the power of Prior Knowledge

The day before Thanksgiving, Prior Knowledge was gobbled up (gobble gobble) by Salesforce.

Prior Knowledge is the company behind Veritable, a predictive database that provides insight into the process of building applications. Referred to as “infer-structure,” the API examines the underlying infrastructure of an application to find causal relationships. It then tells developers what they might be missing. Using this system, developers without deep knowledge of statistics or analytics can make data-driven predictions.

Since the product entered public beta in July and made it to the finals at TechCrunch Disrupt, there has been a lot of excitement surrounding the technology and its MIT PhD holding founders.  Salesforce has been on an aggressive buying spree this year of mobile, social and cloud startups, and while P(k) does not fit into any of those categories, it could help Salesforce take on enterprise behemoth Oracle. Now, Salesforce has an “oracle” of its own, a database that can predict the future.

With this acquisition, Prior Knowledge will shut down the Veritable API and service on December 5. The details of the purchase have not been disclosed. Read the company’s blog post.