Salesforce. Image: ymgerman/Shutterstock
Salesforce’s latest earnings were up on analysts’ predictions, following a particularly busy few months of acquisitions for the cloud company.
Amid a competitive landscape, with Oracle and Microsoft eyeing chunks of its market share, Salesforce’s Q3 earnings figures show that the cloud giant is only getting stronger.
Figures were up on analysts’ expectations pretty much across the board, to such a degree that Marc Benioff, CEO of the company, said he expects Salesforce to lodge its first $10bn as soon as 2018, given the current growth rate.
For the current quarter, Salesforce predicted $2.27bn in revenues (analysts were expecting some $2.24bn). That would bring the full year’s total figures up to $8.36bn, with Benioff’s target of that magic $10bn a significant milestone for the company.
“I’m delighted to announce that we expect to deliver our first $10bn year during our fiscal year 2018, which puts us well on the path to reach $20bn faster than any other enterprise software company,” Benioff said.
“Salesforce delivered an exceptional quarter with year-over-year revenue growth of 25pc in dollars and 27pc in constant currency,” he said.
The company claims it closed a record number of seven-figure deals in Q3, including agreements with customers such as Citigroup and Amazon.com.
The biggest black mark on Salesforce’s 2016, though, is missing out on LinkedIn, with Microsoft instead buying the professional social network for $26bn.
“There is a sentiment amongst a lot of our customers in the market that LinkedIn is almost the most valuable CRM tool that anyone has,” said Will Wu, senior director at West Monroe Partners, when discussing Salesforce’s future plans.
Though during Q3 (August-October), Salesforce secured deals for Quip ($750m), BeyondCore ($110m), Krux ($800m) and HeyWire (unknown).
These follow bigger deals for Demandware ($2.8bn) earlier this year, as well as MetaMind ($32.8bn) – proving Salesforce’s shopping spree is not slowing down any time soon.
“We delivered another strong quarter of booked business on and off the balance sheet, which is now more than $12bn, up 27pc year-over-year,” said Mark Hawkins, CFO of Salesforce. “We are pleased to raise our fiscal full-year 2017 revenue guidance by $50m to $8.375bn at the high end of the range.”
Salesforce. Image: ymgerman/Shutterstock
