Salesforce recently reported its earnings and the results were decent, beating Wall Street’s expectations. Despite the previous quarter’s strong showing, the company managed to ease the pressure of activist investors circling around them. However, some parts of their business were growing slowly, even continuing deceleration, signalling that the company has to step up their game. Interestingly, the newest part of the company’s core offerings, the Data Cloud, was the fastest-growing cloud. This could signal a focus shift, where the value of data being generated by Salesforce’s products could become more valuable than the products themselves. At a customer event in New York last month, Salesforce’s keynote speech focused on generative AI, and how using Salesforce’s data instead of the open internet can reduce issues with hallucinations, data ownership, and governance problems.
Salesforce is an American cloud-based software company that provides customer relationship management (CRM) service and also sells complementary enterprise applications focused on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development. The company’s services range from sales automation to customer service management to business analytics.
Activist investors have been circling Salesforce, causing the pressure to rise on the company prior to its earnings report. Activist investors are shareholders whose goals go beyond merely maximizing shareholder value. They seek to impact a company’s decision-making process and strategy. The investors believed that the company was undervalued and that significant changes needed to happen for it to reach its full potential.
