Benioff Teases Dreamforce Releases as Salesforce Revenues Grow
Sales are still on an upward trajectory for Salesforce.com.
The software-as-a-service cloud application provider reported fiscal second quarter 2012 earnings that continue to defy gravity. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff also used his company's earnings call as an opportunity to promote new products that will be formally announced in September at Dreamforce, the company's big user conference.
Salesforce reported revenue of $732 million for its fiscal second quarter, a 34 percent year-over-year gain. Benioff is also optimistic about the rest of the year and is raising the full year revenue guidance for Salesforce.
“The high end of our guidance puts us on pace to deliver a full year revenue growth rate of 34 percent,” Benioff said during the company's earnings call.
HCM Partnership
Salesforce's annual Dreamforce user conference is coming up in September, and there will be no shortage of new and enhanced product releases. Among the new releases will be Salesforce's major new push into the human capital management (HCM) space.
“At Dreamforce, we're going to be announcing Work.com, which is our rebranding and redevelopment of Rypple,” Benioff said.
Salesforce acquired HR software vendor Rypple in late 2011. In March of this year, Salesforce launched its initial Rypple product offering, which will be further extended with Work.com
Benioff also promised an appearance by Aneel Bhusri, CEO of Workday. “You'll see how we are working hard to integrate with them to deliver a full HR suite to our customers between Salesforce.com's Work.com system and Workday,” he said. “And you'll also see Workday's integration with Chatter as well. We're very excited about our initial focus here into HR.”
Human capital management is an increasingly active enterprise software play, with Salesforce rivals Oracle and SAP making HCM purchases of their own in the past eight months.
Mobile App Movement
Benioff will also use the Dreamforce conference as the venue to introduce Salesforce Touch, the next generation of the company's development platform. It will launch with a general availability pilot on the core Salesforce automation application, running in HTML5 for multiple devices.
“You're also going to see that we are delivering a full set of services for our customers to build their own services in HTML5, so they can have heterogeneous device delivery,” Benioff said.
Social Marketing Takes Flight
With both Radian6 and Buddy Media technologies, Salesforce will continue to push its social cloud marketing efforts to help marketing executives, Benioff said. Salesforce acquired social media marketing specialist Buddy Media for $689 million in June.
“We believe that CMOs are going to want their own cockpit to fly, their own fighter jets, because honestly, CMOs are going to start spending much more than CIOs in technology,” Benioff said. “What no one has delivered yet is really that cockpit for the CMO and for all those marketers integrated with the sales and service solutions so that companies can have a total 360-degree, view of their customer from advertising to close. We're going to offer that solution at Salesforce.com.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
