Earnings Labs

Salesforce, Inc. (CRM)

Q1 2016 Earnings Call· Wed, May 20, 2015

$181.14

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Katie and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Fiscal First Quarter Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to our host, Mr. John Cummings. Sir, you may begin your conference.

John Cummings - Director-Investor Relations

Management

Thanks so much, Katie. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us for our fiscal first quarter 2016 results conference call. As always, our first quarter results press release, SEC filings, and a replay of today's call can be found on our IR website at www.salesforce.com/investor. We'll also post the highlights of today's call on Twitter at the handle @salesforce_ir. With me on our call today are Marc Benioff, Chief Executive Officer; Keith Block, President and Vice Chairman; and Mark Hawkins, Chief Financial Officer. Marc, Keith, and Mark will share a few prepared remarks, and then we'll open the call to questions. As a reminder, our commentary today will primarily be in non-GAAP terms. Reconciliations between our GAAP and non-GAAP results and guidance can be found in our earnings press release. During today's call, we may offer additional metrics to provide further insights into our business or results, and this detail may or may not be provided in the future. We may also reference certain unreleased services or features not yet available. We cannot guarantee the timing or availability of these services or features, so recommend customers listening today make purchase decisions based on services and features currently available. Please keep in mind that some of our comments today may contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties and assumptions. Should any of these materialize or should our assumptions prove to be incorrect, actual company results could differ materially from these forward-looking statements. A description of our risks and uncertainties and assumptions and other factors that could affect our financial results are included in our SEC filings, included in our most recent report on Form 10-K, under the heading Risk Factors. Now let me turn the call to Marc. Marc Russell Benioff - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer:…

Operator

Operator

We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. And your first question comes from Kash Rangan [Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc.]. Kasthuri G. Rangan - Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc.: Wow, you're the champions, congratulations. Marc, question for you on the Analytics product. What kind of attach rate do you envision for the company, or what kind of attach rate would you be pleased with for the Analytics product as it relates to the deployment of Sales Cloud and perhaps even the Service Cloud in rough timeframe? And secondly for you, CFO, Mark Hawkins, any impact from invoicing duration, early renewals of deals in the quarter that might have helped you one way or the other? That's it for me. Thank you. Marc Russell Benioff - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Well, thanks, Kash. And I'll tell you, on the Analytics Cloud, I've never been more excited about a product. I don't think there's a customer that I've spoken to this quarter who hasn't been interested in the Analytics Cloud, and I can't imagine a Salesforce customer that's not going to end up with the Analytics Cloud. This is just a breakthrough product. There's never been an Analytics product that's been built from the ground-up as a multi-tenant cloud service built on a metadata platform that gives you the ability to build apps and deploy them rapidly and I think you're going to see some amazing things with the Analytics Cloud when we get to Dreamforce as well. We've had some huge technical breakthroughs in our ability to build an ecosystem around the Analytics Cloud and we plan to show those off. We've only been in this business about 90 days. I don't know why we didn't get this in a lot earlier.…

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from Jason Maynard from Wells Fargo.

Jason A. Maynard - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Management

Hey, good afternoon, guys, and congratulations to a strong start to the year. There's obviously been a lot of talk in the press about the future of the company over the last few weeks. And I know you can't comment on that, but I think the big question, and probably one that customers are asking themselves is: what do you guys think about the prospects for your own business? I know you have a goal of $10 billion in revenue, but there's an old saying, maybe you trade a player a year early versus trading him a year late. And I wonder if customers and investors and all of your stakeholders are saying, what does Marc see after $10 billion? Do you see a runway to being a multi-teens billion, $20 billion company? Is that something that you have the line of sight on and have the confidence in your TAM, your products, and your management execution to reach? Marc Russell Benioff - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Well, I really appreciate that question, Jason, thanks so much. And when I started this company 16 years ago, we wanted to do three things. We wanted to create a new technology model now known as the cloud. We wanted to create a new business model, which is singularly focused on the success of our customers and helping our customers to create new ways to connect with their customers and help them to innovate and transform their organizations. And, three, we created a new philanthropic model with 1% of our equity and 1% of our profit and 1% of all of our employees' time and, of course, that was very easy because we had no equity, we had no profit, we had no time, but I would say at this point, I…

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from Ross MacMillan with RBC Capital Markets.

Ross MacMillan - RBC Capital Markets LLC

Management

Thanks a lot, and my congratulations, as well. I actually had one for Mark. Mark, you just delivered close to 200 basis points of margin expansion in what I think was the toughest foreign exchange headwind quarter this year. And that number's above your full year guidance, so I was just curious as to how we should think about the pace of underlying operating expense growth as we progress through the year? And does the guidance imply that you're going to accelerate the rate of investment as we look forward? Thanks. Mark J. Hawkins - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Ross, first of all, thanks a lot for the note. And yeah, definitely we feel great about the quarter. I think, and one of the things I would say on the – certainly, the operating margin expansion fourth quarter in a row, we feel really great about the fact that for the full year we guide this 125 basis points to 150 basis points on an even bigger revenue base, right? Because we raised the revenue base and we're showing even more EPS. But I think from an operating margin viewpoint, one of the things that you should think about is that this squares very nicely with our revenue operating margin framework in terms of the rate of growth and the rate of operating margin expansion. So this fits very nicely. But what we're doing also, Ross, as you touch on, is we're making sure to make the investments that are essential to making sure that we grow not only this year but in 2017 and well beyond to fulfill the vision that Marc had articulated earlier on the call. So we feel good about this. It's squarely within the framework. We're delivering on our commitment even on a higher base.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from Brent Thill with UBS.

Brent J. Thill - UBS Securities LLC

Management

Good afternoon. Keith had mentioned an all-time high for seven figure deals in Q1 and I'm just curious, Mark and Keith, are there any common patterns you're seeing out of these deals when you look across like taking multiple clouds, larger seat counts, all of the above? It'd just be great to get a little bit of color in terms of what you saw and what's rolled out in Q1. Keith G. Block - Vice Chairman & President: Hi, this is Keith. Listen, thanks for the question. It really is to a certain extent all of the above. I mean, we're clearly signing up some net new logos in some of the largest enterprises in the world. Some of that is one cloud, some of that is many clouds, but I think the overwhelming sentiment here is that there's a real interest in a long-term strategic relationship with Salesforce. And it is a trust-based relationship and a value-based relationship. And customers really want to leverage our Customer Success Platform to help their customers succeed. So it's a pretty common theme around the Customer Success Platform and industry orientation. I mean, if I look at the kind of larger deals in the quarter that I just went through here, many of these were in financial services, many of these were in telecommunications, some in public sector. And these are kind of the strike zone industries that we're focusing our attention on. So we are hitting our cylinders, all of our cylinders, in terms of getting the mind share of these large enterprises, really enterprises of all size and scale and all geographies, and we're running our playbook and we're just executing well. Mark J. Hawkins - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah, I might just add on that to Keith's point. When I think of the patterns exactly what Keith said. But what I really like, Brent, is just this notion about how much our customers are embracing the Customer Success Platform on a multi-cloud basis. Keith and his team knocked out some huge deals that he talked about. You look at like Bouygues, they picked up Service Cloud, Community, Marketing Cloud. You look at JPMorgan, you look at sales, service, marketing. You look at Tyco that Keith talked about. You look at Sales, Service, Community and Wave. I just think it's exciting to see that pattern be so pronounced. So that's the pattern that I see, Brent.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from Heather Bellini with Goldman Sachs. Heather A. Bellini - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Great. Thank you so much. I had two questions. I guess, the first one is if we go back to Jason's question for a second about the $10 billion sales target, I was just wondering, Mark, if you could just give us a sense, how do you think about what the profitability level of the company might look like, knowing that there's a lot of different things that could happen? But how do you think about the profitability level that you'll be able to achieve, once you get to that $10 billion target that looks increasingly in sight. And then the other question I had, Mark, was just Service Cloud had a big sequential acceleration this quarter. I'm just wondering, are there some factors you could share with us that are causing this? And where are we in the rip and replace of those massive Siebel call center systems that were put in place in the early 2000s? Mark J. Hawkins - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Sure, let me jump into this and we'll see if folks add in here. But, Heather, the $10 billion vision Marc articulated, you can see us driving toward that. You're hearing loud and clear. I think that the profitability will be a function of the speed of how fast we get there. And when we talk about the revenue operating margin framework, very much it's correlated with the rate of the growth rate compared to the operating margin expansion. That's a higher level of framework that remains intact. We continue to execute that. And you can see it even in this period in the guidance for this year. But I do want…

Operator

Operator

And your next question is from Kirk Materne with Evercore ISI.

S. Kirk Materne - Evercore Group LLC

Management

Yeah, thanks very much. Since Keith is staying up late with us in London maybe I'll ask him one about Europe while you're over there. Clearly, that business is accelerating. You guys have put a lot of investment into the region in terms of new data centers. Can you just talk about the adoption trends of customers in Europe? Are you seeing them adopt a cloud at a time? Or are you seeing them jump really straight to the Customer Success Platform? And is there anything you all need to do over there over the next 12 months to really see it continue to accelerate or have you put a lot of the programs in place that we should continue to see you all harvesting some of the investment you made over the last 12 months or so? Thanks. Keith G. Block - Vice Chairman & President: Yeah, yeah. Thanks for the question. Look, obviously, international expansion is a big part of our strategy and EMEA is a big pivot point for that. And we continue to invest. We've rolled out all these programs around industry orientation, additional resources, Solution Selling, a program that we call Ignite, and leveraging this incredible ecosystem that we have built around our partners with a huge focus on customer success from both our own resources as well as the ecosystem partners. And customers are enjoying a bit of our seed and grow strategy but some of them are talking about the wholesale transformation as kind of a long-term strategy with bite-sized chunks, so we are getting incredible traction. We're very, very proud of the results that we're seeing in EMEA and it's pretty clear that our investment strategies are paying off here.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from Keith Weiss with Morgan Stanley. Keith E. Weiss - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Excellent. Thank you guys for taking the question. And again, very nice quarter. Two questions from me. One, there's been a ton of speculation out there in the marketplace around the potential of M&A around salesforce.com. How do you guys – and maybe this is a question for Keith Block, how do you keep your guys focused on the price, focused on execution when there's all that sort of speculation going on externally? And then the second question is just about the industry solutions that are going to be rolling out later this year. Is there anything incremental that you guys need to do in sort of building out the distribution around those industry solutions? Or is that pretty well in place and is it just really putting product into place with what has been a build-out in the vertical distribution capability? Keith G. Block - Vice Chairman & President: Yeah, okay, so thanks for the question. Look, first and foremost, is we don't comment on these rumors. And our focus has always been and will always continue to be on customer success and that goal of the $10 billion, and as Marc said, in going after SAP and passing them. So our people are motivated. They are very excited. It's part of our culture, a big part of our culture, to focus on customer success and our people feel really, really good about what they're doing and the success that they're enjoying with our customers. With respect to our industry strategy and execution around the product, for the most part, we are already starting to pivot around an industry orientation as we're organized in the field. So our distribution model is gradually moving towards an industry orientation over the last couple years. It's hard to believe that in June it will be my two-year anniversary. But over the last couple years, we've started to pivot toward vertical selling organizations, and that is kind of a natural tip of the spear for these solutions that we'll be bringing out.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from Steve Ashley with Robert W. Baird. Steve M. Ashley - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. (Broker): Thank you very much. I'd just like to ask about the Community Cloud and the success you're having there, if we could get some more color around. Are there vertical markets where you're having more success, are there use cases, and are you able to find any synergy with your other cloud offerings? Thanks. Marc Russell Benioff - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Well, I think one of the really great things about our Community Cloud is that it's so tightly integrated with our Sales and Service and Marketing Clouds, and that when our customers buy our solution, they're not just buying a silo, but they're buying part of an integrated solution. I think when you look at some of our core deployments of our Community Cloud, companies like Home Depot, and you can see that if you go to community.homedepot.com or many of the other ones, well, you see that we're tightly integrated with their employees, we're tightly integrated with their partners, and it's been a huge boom for them to be able to increase their store traffic, that they get actual results. I mean, I know that because Salesforce uses our Community Cloud every day, but I don't know a customer that's not planning to deploy this product. I mean, this is something that's extremely important for every company whether they're a B2C company or a B2B company in being able to aggregate their customers and unite them with their employees. As you know, we have a very strong integrated system of engagement with our core product, and that system of engagement is tightly integrated with our system of record, and is now with our Analytics Cloud tightly integrated with our system of intelligence, so a system of record tightly integrated with a system of intelligence, tightly integrated with the system of engagement, and that system of engagement is extended into those core customer offerings through our Community Cloud, and that's the right architecture. That's the right product. It's had phenomenal success, super high growth rate and I expect continued great performance from it this year.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from Sarah Hindlian with Brean Capital.

Sarah Hindlian - Brean Capital LLC

Management

Hi, gentlemen. Thanks for taking my question and congrats on the quarter. I had a couple questions for you. When you're signing customers on Wave, and I realize it's still very early, but do you see this as a product where you're encroaching more on legacy BI vendors or is this an additive to your deployment or a pure greenfield opportunity? And then lastly, I'm just wondering what kind of momentum you're seeing in Marketing Cloud, which is obviously growing nicely at 29%, but not as fast as services and platforms, and so I'm wondering where do you see that trending this year? Marc Russell Benioff - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Well, number one, on Analytics Cloud, the answer to your question is, all of the above. I mean, when we're in there, I presented that product today to two executives, one of the world's very largest insurance companies here in Chicago, and they've never seen anything like that. And I don't think anything like it exists. They probably already own every product, you know? And I don't think that's a reason why they wouldn't buy ours, because they don't use that product. Those other products are really isolated and used by analysts, and they're not analytics for everyone. They're certainly not analytics for the rest of us. They don't run well on iPhones and Android devices. They don't run on the Apple Watch. They don't run – you can't spin it up instantly in our cloud environment. So this is just an extraordinary offering, and it is only – again, I've obviously seen the next two versions, and it is just going to get better and better and better. And we're going to just bring in a very deep ecosystem of developers and apps, and we're going to…

Operator

Operator

And your last question comes from Raimo Lenschow with Barclays.

Raimo Lenschow - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Management

Hey, it's great that Barclays is a customer. And it's great that I get the last question here. Thank you. Mark, a quick question, now that we know the breakout of the different clouds, we see that the Sales Cloud, if I adjust for currency, is still growing strong in double-digit. Can you talk a little bit about the opportunity there? Remember, that's kind of where a lot of people said, "oh, it's getting mature, your market share is really high," but you keep growing, putting up these really healthy numbers despite the size. What are you seeing in that market? Thank you. Mark J. Hawkins - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Okay, so let me just touch a little bit, and I think maybe I could turn this over to Keith. Certainly I think you hit it right. We were certainly pleased to see the growth rate that was posted in U.S. dollars. Again if you add on the constant currency, you've got a business that's at scale. It's a $2.5 billion business growing really attractively, and again, just the gold standard in the world with lots and lots of opportunity. I'd just like to turn it over to Keith, I know, on other commentary on this as well. Keith G. Block - Vice Chairman & President: Yeah, thanks, Mark. Listen, I think we've all seen the commentary and the pundits in the marketplace. I think the numbers speak for themselves. This is a terrific product. It is a flagship product, and we continue to take net new logos all over the world in all shapes, size, forms of companies in all industries. And arguably you can say it's the most loved sales app in the world. So we see an awful lot of interest in our…

John Cummings - Director-Investor Relations

Management

All right, Katie, I think we can wrap up. So thanks everyone for joining us on the call today. We'll look forward to updating you on our fiscal Q2 results in August. In the meantime, if you have any questions for us, you can e-mail us at investor@salesforce.com. Thanks so much.