Salesforce stock price spiked 12% on news that it hired bankers to field takeover bids

Salesforce stock spiked Wednesday amid reports that the company has hired bankers to field buyout offers.

The cloud giant’s stock moved 12 percent to above $75 Wednesday afternoon, the price fluctuating wildly.

A Bloomberg report revealed the news earlier today, citing sources saying that the bankers might either work on putting a deal together or work to fend off takeover bids. The sources also said there’s no guarantee of a deal.

Above: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

Image Credit: Steve Jennings/Getty Images

The story speculates that Microsoft, Oracle, or SAP — Salesforce’s main competitors — could be among the bidders to buy Salesforce.

Such a takeover would be the biggest of a cloud software company. Salesforce’s market cap now sits at $44 billion.

Salesforce started as a developer of customer relationship management (CRM) software, and it is still the largest provider of such software, but the company has made giant steps into the business of serving enterprise applications of all kinds from the cloud.

VentureBeat Insight analyst Andrew Jones said the motivation to buy Salesforce might have something to do with its marketing cloud.

“Their aggressive move into the marketing space is the likeliest reason that someone would want to take them over,” Jones said. “Although Salesforce is known primarily as a CRM company, they are one of only a few companies that have built a marketing cloud.”

“Marketing doesn’t have a core technology platform the way other departments do, but a marketing cloud has the potential to become that platform,” Jones said. “Whoever makes the biggest inroads there is going to make a lot of money, as marketing budgets continue to grow.”

So far Salesforce has not commented on the Bloomberg story.