Salesforce Aims for $10B in Fiscal 2018
Software as a Service (SaaS) pioneer Salesforce is moving into new revenue territory as the company continues to grow and add new services.
Salesforce announced its third quarter fiscal 2017 earnings on November 17, with revenue reported at $2.14 billion, for a 25 percent year-over-year gain. Looking forward to the fourth quarter, Salesforce provided fourth quarter guidance for revenue in the range of $2.267 billion to $2.277 billion. For Salesforce's fiscal 2017, the full year revenue guidance is now forecast to come in between $8.365 billion to $8.375.
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, is so confident of his company's continued growth that he has also provided revenue guidance for fiscal 2018 as well. Benioff forecasts that fiscal 2018 revenues will be between $10.1 billion to $10.15 billion, representing year-over-year growth of approximately 21 percent.
Even further into the future, on Salesforce's earning call, Benioff already predicted when his company will double its $10 billion revenue milestone.
“Towards $20 billion, I don’t know exactly when we’re going to double the company by, but my dream certainly is to double,” Benioff said. “My dream is to double this company within the next three to four years for sure. That’s really important to me.”
Saleforce is growing both its user base as well as the services that it offers to customers. According to Benioff, Saleforce today is trusted by a global community of 1 billion customers, consumers, citizens, partners and employees.
All of Saleforce's major lines of business grew revenues year-over-year during the third quarter of fiscal 2017, with Sales Cloud up 13 percent, Service Cloud 26 percent, App Cloud up 38 percent and Marketing Cloud growing by 46 percent.
Saleforce is now moving into the artificial intelligence (AI) space with the recent launch of Salesforce Einstein.
“Now we’ve extended our Salesforce platform once again with an AI layer, with Einstein, and it’s really world’s easiest AI, ” Benioff said.
Benioff is also very enthusiastic about the continued improvement of his company's mobile apps, which he uses himself to help run Salesforce itself.
“Hey, I run my whole business on my phone and that surprises a lot of people,” Benioff said. “And to see the amount of information and insights that you can get from that is just incredible.”
During Saleforce's earnings call, Benioff was also asked about the impact of the recent U.S election and what effect it has on his outlook for the future
“In regards to the election – look, some of us many not have had the outcome that we want, some of us have the outcome we did want,” Benioff said. “In my view, it’s in the past. We’re moving forward and we have, at Salesforce, an open heart, we have an open mind and we also expect the best.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Apps Today and InternetNews.com. 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.
