Earnings Labs

Salesforce, Inc. (CRM)

Q4 2015 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 26, 2015

$181.14

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Chanel and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the CRM Q4 2015 Earnings 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 will now turn the conference over to John Cummings, Vice President, Investor Relations.

John Cummings - Director-Investor Relations

Management

Thanks so much, Chanel, and good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us for our fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2015 results conference call. Our fourth 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 the 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, 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, including our most recent report on Form 10-Q, particularly under the heading Risk Factors. With all that, let me turn the call over to Marc. Marc Russell Benioff - Chairman…

Unverified Participant

Management

355. Marc Russell Benioff - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: So we're going to be doing 355 events this quarter all over the world. I will be at many of them but not all of them. And I hope that you will join us, whether you are in London or Paris or New York, whether it's Melbourne or Tokyo, Amsterdam and you can experience the power of salesforce of the cloud, social, mobile world coupled with data science and analytics. I mean, this is just a sight to behold and I just want to congratulate everyone in the company for creating the first company, first cloud company to ever get to $5 billion. But we're the fastest software company ever to $5 billion and can't wait to get on the call, 90 days to tell you about, the fastest company to $6 billion. And now, let's turn it over to Keith. Keith G. Block - Vice Chairman & President: Thanks, Marc. There's a lot of great things to say about this quarter, but the thing I'd like to say is how proud I really am about our performance in FY 2015 and really the outstanding work that I saw in the quarter and in the year and I want to congratulate, as Marc said, just an incredibly high-performing team, a super high-performing team, once again for their, I would call, sustained excellence. As far as how we ended the year, suffice it to say that we fired another shot across the bow to the legacy antiquated on-premise software companies and our competition and, Marc, you just said this, and I absolutely agree. It was an exceptional quarter, an exceptional year, and Q4 was a capstone to this outstanding year. So this was a year in FY 2015 that we saw…

Operator

Operator

Your first question is from the line of Mark Murphy with JPMorgan. Please go ahead with your question.

Mark R. Murphy - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · Mark Murphy with JPMorgan. Please go ahead with your question

Yes. Thank you very much. A question for Marc Benioff. I, of course, saw your commentary about reaching $5 billion in revenue faster than any other enterprise software company, and aspiring to be the fastest to reach $10 billion. And meanwhile there are so many signs of accelerating momentum, looking through the billings growth, the deferred revenue growth, the Service Cloud growth, the platform growth; they're all actually accelerating and those markets are very large. So I'm wondering if the current offerings can carry you to $10 billion or even $15 billion in revenue. And if you have ever sketched out a path to a level beyond that, what else do you think could logically fit into the portfolio? And perhaps is it possible you would define e-commerce as a part of the CRM stack at some point? Marc Russell Benioff - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: I really appreciate that question and I think you really don't have to go any farther than looking at our book business on and off the balance sheet at $9 billion to ask yourself the question are we going to $10 billion? I mean $10 billion will be fueled primarily by that. I can tell you more or less where revenue will be a year from now or even two years from now because you can kind of look at deferred. We don't do that because there can be changes in foreign exchange, there can be changes in other characteristics of the business, but if you look back now, Salesforce has been a public company for over 10 years. You can see how our deferred model has played out with the kind of consistent revenue growth, even through 2008 or even through dark times, the deferred continue to pay out on to the…

Operator

Operator

Your next question is from the line of Rick Sherlund with Nomura. Please go ahead with your question.

Rick Sherlund - Nomura Securities International, Inc.

Analyst · Rick Sherlund with Nomura. Please go ahead with your question

Yeah. Thanks so much and good quarter. First, Keith, I wonder if you could talk about verticals. You had mentioned that at Dreamforce that we'll be hearing more soon about your approach to addressing vertical markets. As I recall, Siebel Systems had about 22 verticals that they addressed, and right now you guys kind of have only one or so verticals. And also, maybe for Mark Hawkins, on the sequential increase in the Sales Cloud, I heard your comments on FX. It looks like it was up only about 1% sequentially. That even if I assumed it's flat, and take that on the first year-over-year number, we're going to have, which is April, it's still about 10%. So is it fair to assume that when we start getting the numbers – year-over-year numbers that Sales Cloud's still going to be, on a constant currency basis, a double-digit growth business? Mark J. Hawkins - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: So do you want to take the verticals first, and maybe the... Keith G. Block - Vice Chairman & President: Yes. Why don't I do that? So, Rick, thanks for asking the question. So we're very excited about our industry strategy, and it takes many flavors. I think the reason why the company continues to get such traction with these enterprise customers and really customers of any size and any geography is because when we talk to these customers, we are speaking in the language of the customer. So that's kind of point number one. We are focused really on six industries right now. And all of that is equipping our folks with the solutions and the messages that our customer's really demanding and asking for. So we're listening to our customers. And we will be making some announcements shortly…

Operator

Operator

Your next question is from the line of Brent Thill with UBS. Please go ahead with your question.

Brent John Thill - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst · Brent Thill with UBS. Please go ahead with your question

Good afternoon. Keith, a question for you on the traction with the larger enterprise deals. I'm just curious if you could give us a little more color. You have some phenomenal logos that you're reading through. But is there anything quantitatively you can share with us what you're seeing in the success of – as you've gone upstream? Keith G. Block - Vice Chairman & President: Yeah, listen – thanks for the question. I think – first of all, I think that the numbers were astounding. We're incredibly proud. I'm certainly proud of the work that the team has done, and I think it is proof positive about the relationships that we're building strategically with these customers. You don't do these types of deals at scale and volume unless you're successfully getting mind share and building those great relationships. We've got – over the year and certainly in the quarter, we've done some wonderful work with some of the best brands and the best companies in the world. Like 3M and ABB, Time Warner I mentioned, obviously. And some of these I could not mention before by name. But there are just many, many examples of us doing an incredible job, building more and more traction and becoming more meaningful. And now, I have to tell you part of this comes from the opportunity for us to really unshackle either legacy SAP environments or have – give customers the opportunity to transform their business models, because they've really been shackled by legacy technology for years. And with this absolute convergence of cloud and social and mobile, it really gives us an opportunity to talk about what our Customer Success Platform can do for them, generally speaking. I mean, Marc and I had the opportunity to spend some time with Brian Moynihan in Davos and we talked about how CFAs (34:30) transforming their business. And those are the types of meaningful relationships that we're really talking about here. So, again, we're very excited about what's going on. And a lot of our growth initiatives are really taking some traction here.

Operator

Operator

Your next question is from the line of Terry Tillman with Raymond James. Please go ahead with your question. Terry F. Tillman - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Hey, guys. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. I guess my question is on the Wave Analytics product. I know it's still early but in terms of the deals that you're signing or the deal opportunities, are you seeing large enterprise deals? Or are these still more try it before you really buy it kind of departmental level deals? And then typically are you replacing something that's a legacy DI (35:08) vendor or is this kind of greenfield investments for the analytics solution? Marc Russell Benioff - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Well, first of all, we've never seen a product take off with these kind of numbers before. In the fourth quarter which was the first quarter that we sold the Wave Analytics Cloud. We saw a lot of very large transactions, probably the very largest transactions that happened in the analytics industry happened on our platform. And we were really taken aback by that. We've decided to focus with dedicated distribution personnel this fiscal year because of that. We've also made a very significant investment and upgrade and the number of people working on the product. And this is the real deal. I mean we really have a world-class product on our hands. And in our minds the way we think is, we only want to focus on those multi-billion dollar opportunities or as we call them clouds. And there's just no doubt in our mind that this is – has all the makings of that. And of course, we keep track of what all the startups are doing and we're very friendly with them, and even a part…

Operator

Operator

Your next question is from the line of Karl Keirstead with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead with your question.

Karl E. Keirstead - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst · Karl Keirstead with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead with your question

Thanks. Question for Marc or Keith on the Service Cloud. It's now 27% of your subscription revenues, your fastest growing segment. Your partners are quite positive about it. I just wanted to ask, is this really a function of salesforce on the sales execution front doing a better job selling it into your Sales Cloud customer base? Has the product improved? What's the key driver of that growth? And then a follow-up for Mark Hawkins. You gave your April quarter DR guide of mid- to high-20% range. I presume that's U.S. dollars. Just curious what you're assuming in terms of a likely FX hit in the April quarter on DR? Thank you. Marc Russell Benioff - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Well, I think I just want to make some initial comments and then I'll let Keith chime in. And the first thing is you look at our competitors and their work in good customer service area. Number one, Oracle, they bought right now – they have their own Fusion service product. They took Fusion, they turned it into confusion. Oracle keeps saying they're growing more quickly than anyone else in the cloud. Well, that's very easy to do when you're starting at zero. And Service Cloud from Oracle, that's a great example. This is not a multibillion dollar business for Oracle like it is for us. They have not been able to execute. They don't have a multi-tenant shared, scalable, mobile, social, integrated analytics customer Service Cloud and then move on to SAP. They will just come into customers and say just use Hana. And it's like but for what and how? And unload the software into your company. First of all, I think the number one thing about this customer service revolution that's going on and why Service…

Operator

Operator

Your next question is from the line of Joel Fishbein with BMO Capital. Please go ahead with your question.

Joel P. Fishbein - BMO Capital Markets

Analyst · Joel Fishbein with BMO Capital. Please go ahead with your question

Thank you for taking my question. I just wanted to take it up more from a bigger perspective in terms of – we looked at these six engines of growth: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud but I want to look at it holistically from the customer's perspective. Can you talk about how salesforce – and give us some specific examples about how salesforce is becoming more strategic as an enterprise provider/solution provider and maybe some examples about how people are buying the solutions holistically and looking at salesforce that way. Marc Russell Benioff - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Well, I think that's really a great point. Keith and I have been talking a lot about that. Because in this quarter, what Keith and I were really struck by is in all of our very largest transactions, we were not dealing with the CIO in the company, or the head of sales or the head of service or the head of marketing. We were dealing with the Chief Executive Officer in the company. And that was a huge shock to us. We really either keep their eye on (44:32) our careers going back now a couple of decades, we have not really seen ourselves showing up in the CEO office. And Keith mentioned one and I'll just come back to this which is, here's an example of a great company, which is $43 billion German manufacturer called ABB. And ABB is a great company. They are a very diversified provider of industrial scale energy products and other products. And when ABB did the transaction with us, the CEO was personally involved. And they wanted to issue a press release and issue a statement about the strategic nature of the transaction which we did, which was a very strong eight…

Operator

Operator

Your next question is from the line of Phil Winslow with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead with your question. Philip Alan Winslow - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): Hi. Thanks, guys, and congrats on showing upside both on the billings and bookings line, but also just on operating margin line. It's kind of like the Lego quarter, movie quarter. Everything is awesome. So within sort of in that context, question for both Marks here. Marc B, just from your standpoint, wonder if you could kind of walk through how you sort of imagine, I guess, the evolution of the company here because you've laid out these longer-term revenue targets, but then also on this call, you focused a lot in your prepared remarks on margins. Just from sort of the CEO's perspective, how do you sort of see that give and take there? And then for Mark Hawkins, obviously, at Analyst Day, you laid out the framework for growth and margins. Wonder if you could kind of just reiterate that for everyone, but also put the 20 – sorry, fiscal 2016 guidance sort of in the context of that? Marc Russell Benioff - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Great. Well, I think first and foremost, our shareholders have spoken that they want us to keep our non-GAAP operating margin in mind. And for us to – as we work on our revenue growth plans to have clarity and mindfulness about delivering not just the phenomenal pace of top-line growth, which we certainly have done, but also improve the non-GAAP operating margin as you saw this year by 175 basis points. And that's why this year we're coming in and saying that we're expecting to deliver another 125 basis points to 150 basis points of operating margin while continuing the…

Operator

Operator

Your final question today will come from the line of Bhavan Suri with William Blair. Please go ahead with your question. Bhavan S. Suri - William Blair & Co. LLC: Hey, guys. Just one for Keith, and congrats, too. But, Keith, just a little bit of color if you could give us on sort of the contribution of the influence of the large SIs like Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG. And then as you look at the concept of the data driven organization and the ability to build some custom (51:52) analytical apps, does it feel reasonable to feel like those large SIs are going to get even more involved given they've all got pretty big analytics practices? And as they do get involved, if that's the case, longer term, is there a chance that we get them to become such an influence that they do drive more leverage on the sales and marketing line because of the reach they provide? Keith G. Block - Vice Chairman & President: Yeah, listen – thanks. That's a great question. Thank you for the question. As I mentioned earlier, we're obviously very, very excited about the launch of analytics, and our partners are as well. So we have worked very, very hard over the last 12 months to strengthen our relationships with the strategic influencers in the market, be it Accenture or PwC or Deloitte, or cloud sharers (52:32) even some of the regional players. And we think that's very important because they're in the boardroom, and they have the influence with our clients. And we are very aligned around customer engagement and our customer platform and growth strategy for customers. The early returns from these firms are very – they're very, very excited about what the Analytics Cloud is all about. So that's a natural play for them because they can wrap some incredibly high value-add services around our offering, and really do, I would say, more of the advisory services which are probably more margin services for them. So they're excited, we're excited, we continue to build out those relationships and I think you're just going to continue to see great progress there.

Operator

Operator

Thank you for your questions. I will now turn the conference back to John Cummings for closing comments.

John Cummings - Director-Investor Relations

Management

All right. Well, thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We really appreciate the time and, of course, just to remind everyone that Marc Benioff here will be keynoting the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference on Monday, March 2. So look forward to seeing many of you there. Of course, you can always refer questions to us in the interim at Investor at salesforce.com, and of course, we look forward to updating you on our progress this year on – in May. So thanks very much for joining us.