Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2013/11/19/salesforce_disappointing_earnings/
Salesforce slaps Amazon, Google with glove: 'I'm THE FIRST $1bn-quarter enterprise cloud biz'
But faint whiff of trouble pulls shares down
Posted in On-Prem, 19th November 2013 00:32 GMT
Salesforce shares stumbled down 1.5 percent on Monday after the customer relationship management company reported third quarter revenues that narrowly beat analyst expectations.
The company booked sales of $1.072bn, with a billion coming from its core businesses, and $72m from other assets such as platform-as-a-service cloud Heroku. Revenue was up 36 percent year over year.
Revenues beat analyst expectations of $1.06bn, and net earnings per share estimates of 9 cents per share.
The company also issued full-year revenue guidance for its next financial year, and reckoned it would book between $5.15bn and $5.20bn in sales.
Salesforce's leader Marc Benioff put his name on a canned statement that claimed "Salesforce.com is the first enterprise cloud computing company to deliver a $1 billion quarter,".
We would point to the quarterly revenues of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and others, as evidence for why this statement is wrong, but doubt marketing-whizz Benioff would care.
These earnings come at a time when Salesforce is reinventing itself from a software-as-a-service firm to a platform-as-a-service company via its new Salesforce 1</a product range.
This may be a somewhat tall order for the company, given that a recent bout of botched network maintenance may have caused a huge crash at its US data centers. ®