Salesforce.com FY Q4 Beats; FY 2009 Outlook In Line

Salesforce.com (CRM) yesterday afternoon reported fourth quarter revenue of $217 million with EPS of 6 cents, beating the Street at $209.2 million and 4 cents. (Click here for Conference Call.)

For the January 2009 fiscal year, the company sees revenue of $1.03 billion to $1.035 billion, with EPS of 32-33 cents. The Street had been looking for $1.03 billion and 33 cents. Previously, the company had forecast revenue of $1 billion to $1.02 billion.

In after hours trading, CRM was up $2.86, or 5.4%, at $55.48.

Comments

[User 157527]

I do not question superiority of on-demand (SaaS) model or quality of Salesforce.com service offering. What I really want to learn is HOW does this model work for their customers in terms of return on their investment? Did they realize improvements in their sales effectiveness, if that what they expected from this investment? In other words WHAT are the Salesforce.com (CRM) customers expectations and how do they measure their success or failure? I wait for a day when we stop evaluating tool vendors on the basis of their sales achievements and start to look at success ratio of their customers achieving expected returns on their investments. This is not a reflection on Salesforce.com specifically, but on IT industry value system in general.

Chef of the very respectable restaurant in South Hampton (Silvers), once reacted to McDonald' board boasting "Served 5 million customers" with this interpretation - "Eat [Comment edited for abusive language] - a gazillion flies can't be wrong".