Salesforce.com chief emerges from quiet zone
Published: 23 Jul 2004 11:00 BST
Looks like your first financial-analyst day didn't do much for your stock. What happened?
We made a number of exciting announcements today. We announced that as of the end of June, we had 10,700 customers and 161,000 paying subscribers. In the first 60 days of our second quarter, we've added 900 customers and 14,000 paying subscribers. We think that's very good growth. And we also announced two new large customers today. We announced Corporate Express, which has 3,000 users. And we also announced that Cisco Systems is making a worldwide deployment on Salesforce.com for the worldwide sales organisation and channel partners.
That sounds like great news, but investors weren't impressed. Your stock lost more than 25 percent of its value.
For us, we can just tell you exactly how we're doing, and the market has to react to it. We're excited about our progress. We're excited about our customers, about our user growth and customer growth. We'll just have to see, over the long term, how the stock does.
A lot of enterprise software companies are missing their financial targets. What do you think is going on?
I've said it before -- I think it's the end of software. I think companies don't want to take on the risk or the complexity or the difficulty associated with these big, complex enterprise software implementations. Companies like we announced today, who are traditional prospects for this technology, right? In some cases, they've already bought this technology and they don't want to stay with it. We think that customers are very excited about the viable alternatives that are out there like Salesforce.com -- which provides a much easier solution for them.
Are you feeling this pullback on corporate software spending as well?
We added 19,730 subscribers in all of the first quarter, right? So far, in the first two-thirds of the second quarter, we've added already 14,000 subscribers. So that should tell you that we're still seeing good, solid subscriber growth.
But isn't your model a small sliver of the overall business applications market?
I don't think so. I think that in terms of customers and market share, and strategic deals that are closing -- today we had a panel with Automatic Data Processing, Corporate Express, SunGard and Innovex Pharmaceuticals. And we had the Cisco announcement. Those are all traditional prospects for large enterprise systems. Why is it that we're closing those deals, but Siebel's not? I think that's really the question at hand. Our job is to continue to deliver on that momentum.
You've been taking pains to keep yourself out of trouble by not saying things to the media. Have you learned lessons from the bumpy road that preceded your IPO?
Well, it's all lemons in the lemonade. We're very happy with the outcome of the IPO, and we're excited to be a public company. It's been an exciting journey, and we're happy that we made it.
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