Cloud vendor Salesforce.com has bought messaging and screen-sharing outfit Dimdim for around $31m as it continues to out-Facebook Facebook for its biz customers.

The company said yesterday it had acquired Dimdim – which was founded in 2007 and has offices based in Lowell, Massachusetts, and Hyderabad, India – in an effort to bump up its biz collaboration software tool, dubbed Chatter, which is a bit like Facebook and Twitter for the corporate set.

In December, Salesforce splashed $212m on the Heroku cloud platform to help bolster the Marc Benioff-run firm's programming of tools for web-based apps.

Its latest company takeover reflects Salesforce's desire to stamp the company's cloudy authority on Web2.0 collaboration software for businesses.

"Facebook has fundamentally changed the way we communicate in our personal lives," said Benioff.

"The acquisition of Dimdim will help Salesforce.com deliver to the enterprise the same integrated collaboration and communication experience that made Facebook the world's most popular internet site." ®