Salesforce Revenue Hits $1.6B, Benioff Slams CRM Rivals
Business is booming for Salesforce, and CEO Marc Benioff wants everyone to know it. For its second quarter fiscal 2016 financial results, which the CRM giant released yesterday, Salesforce reported revenue of $1.63 billion for a 24 percent year-over-year gain.
Salesforce's net income picture also improved during the quarter, with a reported loss of $852,000, down from a loss of $61 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2015.
Salesforce is seeing tremendous growth in the adoption and usage of its core CRM platform, Benioff said.
“We delivered 234 billion transactions for our customers in the quarter, up 79 percent from a year ago,” he said. “That's an average of nearly 3.7 billion transactions every single business day.”
Billions in CRM Business
During the Salesforce analyst call, Benioff also took aim at his rivals in the CRM business.
“Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are selling millions of dollars of CRM, that's with an ‘m,'” he said. “We are selling billions of dollars of CRM, that's with a ‘b,' and that is the difference between us and the competition.”
Oracle and SAP are following the lead of IBM and its mainframe business, Benioff said, noting that while IBM still sells a lot of mainframes, that doesn't mean IBM is innovating on the platform.
“It just means they're selling them old technology and upgrading it, and that's what you see with companies like Oracle and SAP,” Benioff said. “These are old technology bases that are kind of meandering along like mainframes.”
Oracle's Cloud Fail
Benioff also took specific and direct aim against Oracle for failing in the cloud.
“I mean, for a long time, Larry (Ellison) said that the cloud was ridiculous and then he started taking it more seriously, but I just haven't seen any competitive cloud solutions from Oracle,” Benioff said. “I do view Larry as one of the most capable leaders in our industry. He is amazing and he is one of my mentors, but in this area of the cloud Oracle has not delivered.”
Never one to miss the opportunity to sell, Benioff also used his company's earnings call as a venue to promote the upcoming Dreamforce conference, which runs from Sept. 15 -18 in San Francisco.
One of the big announcements set for Dreamforce, Benioff said, is an expanded relationship with Microsoft including deeper integrations with Microsoft's Office, Outlook and Azure. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is delivering a keynote address at Dreamforce this year.
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.
