Diane Greene, the SIlicon Valley vet who Google recently hired to run its cloud business. It also bought her startup, Bebop. Salesforce's $360 million deal to buy cloud software maker SteelBrick is its biggest acquisition in more than two years. SteelBrick's quote-automating service is growing fast and could make Salesforce a more robust sales platform. But some investors believe the deal could also be a sign of much bigger things to come next year: a more active M&A market in the cloud software space. "This is kind of like a canary in a cold mine deal. I think 2016 will be a very interesting year from an M&A perspective," Jason Green, general partner of the VC firm Emergence Capital, told Business Insider. And he thinks Google will be one of the companies doing the buying. A new crop of cloud startups Green's firm focuses on enterprise and cloud-based companies, and has had a lot of success over the years with early
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