Just like Dorothy Gale coming to realize, upon her return to Kansas, that she didn’t have to go beyond her own backyard to find everything she could ever want, I had one of those moments yesterday with my email inbox.

Being somewhat new to the CRM industry, I had an inkling that the Salesforce.com acquisition of Radian6 was a pretty big deal when I came across the press release on Wednesday morning (it came as part of one of several  RSS feeds I get every day in my—you guessed it—email inbox). In writing my story, I spoke to Paul Greenberg and Denis Pombriant, and they both told me it was huge news, but it wasn’t until after I posted the story and tweeted about it that I came to realize the magnitude of the deal. It didn’t take long for my email inbox to start filling up with requests to weigh in, unsolicited comments, and random musings from industry experts, pundits, competitors, and partners of Salesforce.com and Radian6.

Here’s just a sampling of the comments I received throughout the day:

“The acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce.com demonstrates the real value of social media and social media monitoring to the broader market. It will accelerate awareness of social media’s business value and the need for social media monitoring solutions to deliver improved business outcomes.”

— Kelly Pennock, CEO of Visible Technologies.

“This move makes sense: Social media is playing an increasingly large part in how organizations listen to and engage with their customers. In addition to enhancing the Service cloud, Radian6 will also help enhance Chatter by adding real-time insights from across the social Web to the activity happening within the company. It will also add more social listening capabilities inside the Force.com platform.”

— Jon Miller, chief marketing officer of Marketo.

“Salesforce.com has built from its base in the cloud and expanded into mobile and social. Marc Benioff’s strategy reflects bets on the five pillars of consumer tech entering the enterprise. While this acquisition does not solve the lack of a good analytics platform in Salesforce.com today, a Radian6 acquisition delivers social analytics or socialytics for Salesforce.com customers.  The only key pillar missing in its acquisition strategy is unified communications and video.  One can expect this pillar to be hot on the medium-term acquisition short list.”

— Ray Wang, principal analyst and CEO of Constellation Research.

“Today’s Salesforce.com acquisition announcement further validates the explosive nature of the SCRM marketplace and the growing importance of companies not only monitoring what is being said about their brands, products, and services, but being able to actively engage with customers over their preferred social channels. From Meltwater’s perspective, helping companies convert social conversations into lasting, trusted customer relationships is the natural way to move from being a business into being a social business.”

— Jorn Lyseggen, CEO and founder of Meltwater.

If you have something to add, drop me an email at lklie@infotoday.com. I like staying within the confines of my email inbox, safe from the tornadoes, flying monkeys, green men, and wicked witches.