The CRM giant started the financial year well, but admitted it will slow down hiring and M&A activity, as technology companies continue to get hit hard by the stock market. Credit: Salesforce Salesforce saw revenue rise 24% year over year to $7.41 billion, marking a strong start the financial year for the software-as-a-service giant. However, net income fell 94% from $469 million to $28 million for the quarter. Revenue for Sales Cloud was $1.63 billion during the quarter; Service Cloud was $1.76 billion; Marketing and Commerce Cloud $1.1 billion; Data Cloud—which includes Tableau and Mulesoft—$955 million; and Platform—which now includes messaging service Slack—was $1.42 billion, including a $344 million contribution from Slack alone. Salesforce continues to benefit financially from its $27.7 billion acquisition of Slack in 2020. This is a trend that looks set to continue, as organizations across the globe continue to have conversations about facilitating hybrid and remote work models. “Every single one of our customers is deciding how do they succeed in this new era of flexible work, because every single, particularly office worker, isn’t coming back to the office five days a week,” co-CEO Bret Taylor told analysts after the results were announced. Salesforce also cut its full year revenue guidance to $31.7 billion, from $31.8 billion, due to foreign exchange volatility. Salesforce to be more disciplined in 2023 Technology stocks have been hit hard over recent months, and Salesforce is no exception, seeing its stock price drop by nearly 50% so far this year. The CRM vendor saw its stock price rebound by 8% after reporting its results. “So far, we’re just not seeing any material impact from the broader economic world that all of you are in,” Salesforce founder Marc Benioff told analysts. “Demand is very strong, and if you look over the last 23 years, Salesforce has proven to be incredibly resilient.” However, responding to an analyst question about hiring, Salesforce Chief Financial Officer Amy Weaver said “we’re going to continue to hire” but that it will do so at “a much more measured pace, and we’re focusing the majority of our new hires on roles that will support customer success and the execution of our top priorities.” Weaver and Benioff both talked about introducing more discipline into the business as the financial year progresses. “This focus on discipline is being applied across our entire organization,” Weaver said. That discipline will continue to extend to large mergers and acquisitions also, as co-CEO Taylor had said earlier this year that Salesforce doesn’t have “plans for any material M&A in the near term,” however it did make a smaller acquisition last month of Troops.ai. “Right now, large-scale M&A is not part of our current plans. Obviously, we’re opportunistic as all strategic tech companies are, and I never say never, but that is just not something that’s on our current radar screen,” Weaver told analysts. Related content news Adobe introduces AI assistant to help enterprises exploit data held in PDFs Rather than read through long documents, workers will be able to ask questions of them using Adobe’s new Acrobat AI Assistant for enterprise. By Sascha Brodsky May 14, 2024 5 mins Generative AI Productivity Software news Google: Project Starline 3D meeting platform arrives next year Google partnered with HP to commercialize 3D video meeting technology designed to replicate the feeling of face-to-face conversations for remote workers. By Matthew Finnegan May 14, 2024 3 mins Google HP Collaboration Software news OpenAI rival Anthropic launches Claude chatbot in Europe The announcement comes a day after OpenAI announced a new desktop version of ChatGPT and an upgraded user interface called GPT-4o. By Prasanth Aby Thomas May 14, 2024 3 mins Generative AI news analysis OpenAI announces new multimodal desktop GPT with new voice and vision capabilities OpenAI announced what it says is a vastly superior large language model capable of interacting with human-like speeds using text, voice, and visual prompts. But at least one analyst said the company is just playing catch-up with competitors at this p By Lucas Mearian May 13, 2024 7 mins Generative AI Emerging Technology Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe