Building a castle in the clouds

Marc Benioff is considered the craziest celebrity CEO! Forbes columnists’ even say “he has the mind of a fox and the body of a bear”. Maybe it’s this image of a bear that Wall St. bulls are not happy about!

Marc and his team at Salesforce delivered another good quarterly performance only to see their stocks go down in after-hours trading. Revenues went up 26% and EPS was a penny more than what the analysts were expecting. Salesforce is also expecting to cross $10 billion in revenue this year for the first time, browbeating their way to be the fastest to reach this milestone vs. Oracle/SAP.

Marc was once Oracle’s blue-eyed boy and Larry Ellison’s protege. They now take on each other and are very vocal about it, even trying to be the fictional Gavin Belson of Hooli from the hit Silicon Valley series!

In the conference call with analysts late last night, Marc took on Oracle and teased them for abandoning the CRM market and ceding the market share to Salesforce. “And I have to say our competitors have really done a horrible job in last few years”, said Marc in response to a question from Kash Rangan of BofA-ML.

With the aggressive acquisition spree of 2016 behind them and the focus now shifting to its AI product called “Einstein”, Wall St. is now looking forward to the Dreamforce conference later this year to see what’s in store for this cloud king!