Salesforce by the numbers

Salesforce.com is arguably the poster boy for software as a service.

The cloud-based customer relationship management offering is the first that comes to mind when SaaS is mentioned, and with good reason: It had sales last year of just over US$4 billion for the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31, 2014, up 33 per cent over the same period a year ago.

Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff expects this fiscal year revenues will hit $5.3 billion.

Still, the company is posting losses — US$232 million this last year, US$270 million the year before. There were small profits in 2011 and 2010.

Chris Kanaracus of IDG News has dipped into the numbers in the just released annual report and found some interesting facts: for example, marketing and sales costs accounted for 53 percent of its total revenue.

Salesforce does have a number of businesses besides CRM. There’s ExactTarget, a marketing automation service; Work.com, for sales performance management; Chatter, an enterprise social network; Service Cloud, a customer service platform and Salesforce 1 for application development.

It is in the nature of cloud services to have losses while chalking up impressive revenues — Amazon comes to mind. As long as revenues are strong, analysts told me in the early years of that company, then profit would not be far behind.

So it was for Amazon. So it may be for Salesforce.

Would you recommend this article?

Share

Thanks for taking the time to let us know what you think of this article!
We'd love to hear your opinion about this or any other story you read in our publication.


Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

Featured Download

Howard Solomon
Howard Solomon
Currently a freelance writer, I'm the former editor of ITWorldCanada.com and Computing Canada. An IT journalist since 1997, I've written for several of ITWC's sister publications including ITBusiness.ca and Computer Dealer News. Before that I was a staff reporter at the Calgary Herald and the Brampton (Ont.) Daily Times. I can be reached at hsolomon [@] soloreporter.com

Featured Articles

Cybersecurity in 2024: Priorities and challenges for Canadian organizations 

By Derek Manky As predictions for 2024 point to the continued expansion...

Survey shows generative AI is a top priority for Canadian corporate leaders.

Leaders are devoting significant budget to generative AI for 2024 Canadian corporate...

Related Tech News

Tech Jobs

Our experienced team of journalists and bloggers bring you engaging in-depth interviews, videos and content targeted to IT professionals and line-of-business executives.

Tech Companies Hiring Right Now