Salesforce.com, Inc. (Q2 FY19 Earnings)
August 29, 2018
Corporate Speakers:
John Cummings, salesforce.com, inc., SVP of IR
Keith Block, salesforce.com, co-CEO
Marc R. Benioff, salesforce.com, inc., Co-Founder, Chairman & Co-CEO
Mark J. Hawkins, salesforce.com, inc., President & CFO
Unidentified Company Representative
Participants:
Bhavanmit Singh Suri, William Blair & Company L.L.C., Analyst
Stewart Kirk Materne, Evercore ISI Institutional Equities, Analyst
Richard Hugh Davis, Canaccord Genuity Limited, Analyst
Raimo Lenschow, Barclays Bank PLC, Analyst
Keith Weiss, Morgan Stanley, Analyst
Heather Anne Bellini, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Analyst
Mark Ronald Murphy, JP Morgan Chase & Co, Analyst
Ross Stuart MacMillan, RBC Capital Markets, LLC, Analyst
John Stephen DiFucci, Jefferies LLC, Analyst
Terrell Frederick Tillman, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, Inc., Analyst
PRESENTATION
Operator: Welcome everyone to the Salesforce Second Quarter Fiscal Year '19
Conference Call.
(Operator Instructions)
Mr. John Cummings, Vice President, Investor Relations, the floor is yours.
John Cummings: Thank you so much, Jerome. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for
joining us for our fiscal second quarter 2019 results conference call. Our results press
release, SEC filings, and a replay of today's call can be found in our Investor Relations
Web Site at www.salesforce.com/investor.
With me on the call today is Keith Block, co-CEO; Marc Benioff, Chairman and co-
CEO; Mark Hawkins, President and CFO; and Bret Taylor, President and Chief Product
Officer.
As a reminder, our commentary today will be primarily in non-GAAP terms.
Reconciliations between our GAAP and non-GAAP results and guidance can be found in
our earnings press release. 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 to
differ materially from these forward-looking statements. A description of these risks,
uncertainties and assumptions and other factors that could affect the financial results are
included in our SEC filings, including our most recent report on Form 10-Q.
With that, let me to turn the call over to [you, Keith].
Keith Block: Thanks, John. Thanks, everybody, for joining us on the call today. It's an
exciting time in our industry, it's an exciting time for our customers, and it's an exciting
time for Salesforce. As you can see from our results, we continue to deliver incredible
growth [at scale]. You saw it at the end of FY '18, you saw it in Q1, and you see it again
in Q2. We are seeing an unprecedented level of CRM engagement driven by an appetite
for real digital transformation. And at the same time, we are in the midst of an economic
environment that is fueling innovation. And as a result, our customers are making major
and sustained investments in growth and Salesforce is at the forefront of their growth
strategy.
CRM has never been more strategic. It is the largest and fastest-growing category in
enterprise software. Salesforce is the number one provider and after 20 years, we
continue to take share and separate from our competitors. In fact, we're growing at nearly
twice the rate of the market. This gives us tremendous confidence in our ability to reach
$23 billion in revenue by FY '22 -- faster than any enterprise software company in
history. Our vision, our execution and our relentless focus on customer success results
once again an excellent performance across all clouds, all geographies and all industries
in Q2.
Revenue for the quarter rose almost $3.3 billion, up 27 percent. Revenue under contract,
which we now call remaining performance obligation, grew 36 percent to approximately
$21 billion. And based on these strong results, we are raising full year revenue guidance
by $50 million to $13.175 billion at the high end of the range or 25 percent growth this
year. Clearly, we are set up for a strong second half. In Q2, sales cloud grew 13 percent
surpassing $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time. That is an incredible
milestone and in the quarter, which expanded our relationship with a 100-year-old CPG
company which is undergoing a multiyear digital transformation.
We're leveraging sales cloud and marketing cloud, service cloud and Einstein to
accelerate decision-making and support customer-centric growth across their portfolio of
brands. This is a great example of an iconic industry leader stepping into the future with
Salesforce. Service Cloud grew 27 percent as more and more companies, including
National Grid and Southwest Airlines turn to Salesforce to power their next-generation
customer engagements. Southwest, which has won awards for its customer service
leadership, is extending Service Cloud and Einstein to 4,000 service representatives
nationwide enabling them to deliver smarter, more personalized customer experiences.
Marketing and Commerce Cloud grew 37 percent.
In Q2, we expanded with Kimberly-Clark, whose products are used every day by 1
quarter of the world's population. We also deepened our relationship with Hulu which is
using Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud and Einstein to personalize the viewer experience
for more than 20 million subscribers. And finally, the Salesforce Platform grew 32
percent in Q2, 54 percent, including MuleSoft. Customers continue to embrace the
platform from Heroku to Lightning App Builder to Shield and make all their apps smarter
with Einstein.
Now, this is our first full quarter with MuleSoft, which is off to a fast start. The MuleSoft
Anypoint platform has become tablestakes for digital transformation. It's in every
conversation we have with senior executives and in Q2, [New York, like] the state of
Colorado and Schneider Electric selected MuleSoft to transform their enterprises.
In our International business, we continue to deliver strong revenue growth across key
regions, 32 percent EMEA, 28 percent APAC, all in constant currency. In EMEA, we
strengthened our relationships with Rabobank Group. We also had a great commerce
with leading Dutch food retailer, Ahold Delhaize. In APAC, we expanded with MUFG
and Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance. In Japan and Australia we expanded with the countries'
largest telecommunications provider, Telstra. And we formed an exciting new
relationship in the public sector with Australia and Health Practitioner Regulation
Agency.
Now turning to industries. We continue to see great momentum in this space. In health
care, we launched Health Cloud for payers to make it easier for insurance companies to
effectively and efficiently connect with members and providers. We also significantly
expanded with one of the largest private payer in the U.S. by leveraging Health Cloud
and Service Clouds to enhance of their member's experience to reduce the cost of care. In
the quarter, IQVIA, a leading life sciences company significantly expanded with
Salesforce and they are leveraging Health Cloud and the Salesforce Platform to build
innovative solutions to address clinical, commercial and regulatory needs of their clients.
In financial services, we expanded with [BBDA] in the quarter and had a great Financial
Services Cloud win with one of the largest banks in the U.K. You may also remember
that we had our most significant Public Sector win ever for the U.S. Department of
Agriculture last quarter; well, in Q2, the USDA significantly expanded again, in
Salesforce, rolling out Service Cloud and the Salesforce Platform across their entire
agency.
Now on the partners. Partners are absolutely critical in the Salesforce growth strategy
bringing deep industry and domain expertise as they extend our reach and help drive our
customers' digital transformation and our partners continued to strategically invest in the
Salesforce [practices]. In fact, our top 5 SIs increased their total sales certification by 50
percent in Q2. Now I've mentioned before the deep partners run their businesses on
Salesforce and in the quarter, we've had a significant expansion with Deloitte and they're
rolling out Salesforce to more than 300,000 employees. So as you can see, it was a
fantastic quarter of execution across the entire company, our clouds, our geographies, our
industries and we're absolutely well positioned for the second half of the year.
And finally, as you may know, I celebrated my fifth anniversary at Salesforce in Q2. It
has been an incredible 5 years and I couldn't be more excited to leave the company with
Marc for many years to come. I want to thank our customers, our partners, our employees
and our shareholders for their continued trust in us.
And now I'd like to turn the call over to Marc.
Marc R. Benioff: All right, thanks so much, Keith, and congratulations on your
promotion to co-CEO. Well done.
And as you heard from Keith, it was another outstanding quarter here at Salesforce. And
honestly, I feel things have never been better. And I wanted to take a few moments to talk
about the larger forces that are fueling and shaping the phenomenal growth of this
company and our industry. Our drive to $23 billion in revenue in fiscal year '22 and
beyond is being driven by a technological revolution that's fundamentally transforming
our society, the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
In terms of its size, depth, capability and speed, this revolution is altering the human
experience in ways we've never experienced before. Our customers are going through an
amazing digital transformation. Each and every one of them is started and ended with
their customer. And as every company transforms their relationships with their customers
using amazing new technologies from artificial intelligence to the cloud itself, they're
fundamentally changing how they sell and how they service, how they market and how
they innovate.
They're connecting with their customers in a whole new way, they're building incredible
new intelligent 360-degree views of their customers and they're using extraordinary new
tools to get faster, more informed decisions through advanced analytics. And at the heart
of all this transformation is Salesforce. Our position as the number 1 sales, number 1
service, number 1 marketing and number 1 CRM platform is enabling our customers to
stay ahead and drive this Fourth Industrial Revolution. And as more and more companies
connect everything and everyone, they're realizing that integration is vital to their success
and to their digital transformation and now they're turning to Salesforce MuleSoft, the
number 1 Integration Cloud to do it.
Looking more closely, one of the critical aspects of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is
artificial intelligence, the power of machine learning and especially deep learning to give
computers the ability to learn from all kinds of data, and it's giving our customers the
ability to learn about their customers and be far more personalized, efficient, effective in
their relationships. Salesforce Einstein, our own artificial intelligence platform now
provides our customers with over 3 billion predictions and insights every single day.
That's amazing. And with the next generation of Salesforce Einstein that we introduced in
the second quarter, Einstein Bots, first made available on our service cloud, our
customers can now unlock even deeper customers insight to deliver a transformational
customer experience, whether it's with a service agent, whether it's a sales agent or
whether a bot itself.
We demonstrated our leadership in AI by open-sourcing our automatic machine learning
library for structured data, which is the engine that helps power Salesforce Einstein. And
our Salesforce research team introduced deep learning breakthroughs that make it
possible for the first time for a single model to master 10 different natural language
processing patterns at once, significantly improving the way machines understand the
many nuances of human language. It's an incredible step forward for artificial
intelligence. With our acquisition of Datorama, also happened in the second quarter,
we're also now able to extend our Marketing Cloud and bring all of our customers'
marketing efforts into single intelligent dashboard so customers spend less time looking
at spreadsheets and more time acting on the right insights to drive business decisions.
Also in the second quarter, we extended our strategic Alliance with Google to deepen
integration between our Salesforce Marketing Cloud and their Google Analytics 360 and
we're seeing amazing traction with customers that are experiencing the best of both
worlds, Salesforce and Google together.
Salesforce commerce cloud continues to be the fastest growing enterprise commerce
solution, delivering amazing results this quarter for marquee clients like Adidas and
L'Oreal. We extended our Commerce Cloud with another great acquisition, CloudCraze,
the leader in B2B commerce natively on the Salesforce platform. This means now with
the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, our customers can create the same commerce
experiences for their B2B business buyers that they do for their B2C consumers, all from
a single platform.
As you can see, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is well underway here at Salesforce.
Everyone and everything is more connected than ever before. And as part of that, we see
an incredible community grow up as well, all around us and supporting each other to
incredible new heights. These are our trailblazers and they're harnessing the power of our
technology to transform not just their companies and industries but their lives and their
careers. I have to tell you, these trailblazers are an inspiration.
More than 1 million vehicles have now used our free online Trailhead platform to learn
Salesforce skills and elevate their careers and become Salesforce trailblazers. They have
earned more than 8.5 million badges certifying their skills and positioning them for jobs
in the digital economy. In fact, this Salesforce economy will now create 3.3 million new
jobs by 2022. That's amazing and yet another example of how Salesforce is powering this
Fourth Industrial Revolution. And that's why this year's Dreamforce, which is just going
to happen on September 25, is going to be even more than highlighting our incredible
technology. It's going to be a celebration of these trailblazers.
Dreamforce is going to run from September 25 to September 28 in San Francisco. We're
bringing together thought leaders, industry pioneers and more than 100,000 trailblazers
for a whole 4 high-energy days of learning, inspiration, [equality and fun]. And I'm sorry
to say if you don't have your tickets, it's already sold out. Amazing. A first for
Dreamforce.
Finally, in all of our work, Salesforce is guided by our core values. Many of you know
that. You've heard us talk about that now. Our core values -- trust, customer success,
innovation and the equality of every human being. As you know, Salesforce has always
tried to use of those values as a beacon of light for our industry. This started in our
founding with our 1/1/1 model giving back and most recently has evolved with our deep
work in equality. Discussions we have had with our Ohana now over the past few weeks
have raised larger questions about not just the Fourth Industrial Revolution and what's
happening but also about how our values and our core values apply to the use of Fourth
Industrial Revolution technology and also any unintended consequences of their use.
We've seen this discussion take place in many companies as well. We can see that
happening today on the news cycle. It's been amplified by the amazing recent progress in
artificial intelligence and especially in deep learning. Now here at Salesforce, we have
determined that this ethical and humane use of technology, especially within this context
of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it must be clearly addressed -- not only by us but our
industry.
Our industry has reached an inflection point that must be supported by a strong set of
guiding values. We all know that, and you see that every single day. We know the
technology is not inherently good or bad; it's what we do with it that matters. And that's
why we're making the ethical and humane use of technology a strategic initiative at
Salesforce. We have appointed a new officer, an individual tasked with forming new
office of ethical and humane use. And we will work with all of our Ohana, including our
customers, our employees, our partners as well as industry groups and thought leaders
and experts in this area to encourage, promote and publish and implement industry
standards, guidelines and living frameworks around the ethical and humane use of
technology.
This incredible aspect of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the way forward, not just for
our industry but for humanity. We have to make sure that technology strengthens our
societies instead of weakening them. Technology needs to improve the human condition,
not undermine it. We're looking forward to working with all of our Ohana and all of you
in illuminating this important path together and continuing this incredible and critical
discussion, especially here at Salesforce and including coming up at our Dreamforce
conference.
With that, I want to turn over now to Mark Hawkins and discuss the financial details of
the second quarter.
Mark J. Hawkins: Well, thank you, Marc.
And as you've heard, we delivered a strong second quarter result across all of our
products and our regions. Second quarter revenue grew 27 percent in dollars and constant
currency. While there was not a significant year-over-year FX impact to revenue,
sequentially, we saw a $38 million revenue headwind due to FX. MuleSoft contributed
$122 million to total revenue net of purchase accounting adjustments. This was higher
than we anticipated due to a higher mix of license revenue in the quarter.
We're very pleased with MuleSoft's performance to date. Dollar attrition exited the
second quarter of below 10 percent. Second quarter GAAP EPS was $0.39 and non-
GAAP EPS was $0.71. Mark-to-market accounted for our strategic investment portfolio
as required by ASU 2016-01, benefited the GAAP EPS by approximately $0.18 and non-
GAAP EPS by approximately $0.14 in the quarter.
GAAP EPS also benefited by approximately $0.18 related to the partial release of our tax
valuation allowance as a result of the MuleSoft acquisition. Operating cash flow was
$458 million, up 38 percent over last year. The overall strength we saw in the quarter
improving profitability and strong cash collections in Q2 -- were the drivers. Free cash
flow defined as operating cash flow less CapEx, was $288 million in the second quarter,
up 42 percent over last year. Unearned revenue ended the quarter at nearly $5.9 billion,
up 24 percent in both dollars and constant currency.
Similar to revenue, FX did not have a significant year-over-year impact on unearned
revenue, but we did see a sequential FX headwind of approximately $66 million to
unearned revenue in Q2. MuleSoft contributed approximately $77 million to unearned
revenue in the quarter. As you may recall in Q1, we started disclosing a new metric called
remaining transaction price as part of our adoption of ASC 606. To conform with the
emerging industry standard language, we have changed our terminology for the
remaining transaction price to remaining performance obligation. At the end of the
second quarter, our total remaining performance obligation was $21 billion, up 36 percent
over last year. This metric represents all future revenue under contract.
The current remaining performance obligation expected to be recognized as revenue in
the next 12 months was $9.8 billion, up 27 percent year-over-year. Keep in mind the
current portion of this metric is not impacted by invoice and duration unlike unearned
revenue.
Moving on to guidance. Let me briefly touch on the FX environment. As I mentioned,
previously, we experienced a sequential FX headwind to revenues, and we continue to
see some movements in rates. In context, we are now anticipating an FX headwind to
revenue of approximately $75 million to $100 million for the remainder of the year.
Despite this FX headwind, we are raising our full year 2019 revenue guidance by $50
million to $13.125 billion to $13.175 billion or 25 percent year-over-year growth,
including MuleSoft.
Speaking of MuleSoft, let me quickly touch on the revenue for the remainder of the year.
We were very pleased with the performance of MuleSoft in the second quarter. That said,
as a significant portion of MuleSoft's revenue is recognized upfront as license revenue
under ASC 606 and as we have limited history of forecasting under this model, we are
not updating our guidance for MuleSoft contribution to revenue. We will, however,
continue to provide their quarterly revenue contribution for the remainder of fiscal 2019.
Turning to operating margin. Based on our strong performance in the quarter, we are
raising our FY '19 non-GAAP operating margin improvement range to 25 to 50 basis
points for full fiscal year non-GAAP operating margin of 16.75 percent to 17 percent. We
are raising our FY '19 GAAP diluted EPS guidance to $0.97 to $0.99 and non-GAAP
diluted EPS guidance to $2.50 to $2.52. This guidance implies non-GAAP OIE of
approximately $250 million for the full year.
Keep in mind that this guidance does not take into account any possible future impact
from the mark-to-market adjustments related ASU 2016-01, which may cause EPS
volatility based on market conditions. We are raising our full year fiscal 2019 operating
cash flow growth guidance to 15 percent to 16 percent year-over-year. We also now
expect full year CapEx to be 4 to 5 percent of revenue compared to our prior guidance of
approximately 5 percent. For Q3, we're expecting revenue of $3.355 billion to $3.365
billion, GAAP diluted EPS of $0.01 to $0.02, non-GAAP diluted EPS of $0.49 to $0.50.
We expect year-over-year unearned revenue growth of approximately 20 percent in Q3,
including MuleSoft. Our Q3 UR growth rate reflects significant FX headwind to
unearned revenue year-over-year in addition to the continued deepening of our quarter on
quarter seasonality of UR. As a reminder, we will only provide unearned revenue
guidance one more time on the third quarter call, at which point we intend to stop
providing this guidance as you'll have more history WITH the remaining performance
obligation metrics.
As you update your models for the back half of the year, keep in mind, that Dreamforce
is in Q3 of this year and was in Q4 last year. So the associated costs will occur a bit
earlier in FY '19.
To close, we delivered a strong second quarter, closing out a great first half of the year,
positioning ourselves very well for the back half of FY '19 as we head into Dreamforce.
We continue to execute on our strategy of delivering durable growth at scale with some
leverage and are on track for our FY '22 target of $23 billion. And speaking of
Dreamforce, I look forward to seeing many of you at our Annual Investor Day on
Wednesday, September 26. I want to say thank you to our employees, our customers, our
partners and our shareholders for your continued support.
And with that, I'd like to open up the call for questions.
John Cummings: Hey, Jerome, you can just queue up the Q&A for us.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Operator: (Operator Instructions)
Your first question comes from the line of Bhavan Suri of William Blair.
Bhavanmit Singh Suri: I wanted to touch on sort of a broader question here given the
Integration Cloud. Sort of starting to see a lot of this integration with ERP and into back
office systems with MuleSoft. And you sort of verticalized the front end financial cloud,
health cloud, et cetera. How are you thinking about sort of tying that back-end in? Is this
sort of an idea of the supply chain cloud or something along those lines when you when
you think about potential new verticals -- how do you sort of capture some of the value of
the data that you're integrating with the ERP? I just want to understand how you guys are
thinking about that.
Bret Steven Taylor: Yes, this is Bret Taylor. It's a really great question. I think one of the
-- the best opportunity for MuleSoft and our innovation cloud is aligning with our vertical
solutions. If you look at what we're doing with financial services and health care, it's
really about transforming the customer experience with the industry and we can't do it
unless we unlock the data in these legacy systems, whether it's in electronic medical
records or whether it's the incredible amount of investments that the financial industry
has made in their back office systems.
So when we think about the opportunity from MuleSoft, it's really about aligning with
our overall value proposition of transforming customer experiences and upleveling the
conversation of integration from an IT tactical decision to a strategic decision about how
to transform their customer experience. And that's the opportunity that we see over and
over again when we're talking about integration with our customers. It's not just a
problem for the CIO; it's a problem for the CEO. And that's an opportunity integrating
this value proposition.
Keith G. Block: This is Keith. Just to emphasize his point, this morning, I received an e-
mail from the CEO of one of the largest banks in EMEA who wants to bring their entire
executive team over to talk about integration and what MuleSoft can do to unlock their
data. So it's a perfect proof point of exactly what Bret is talking about. There's huge
opportunities in this space.
Marc R. Benioff: Keith, can you just tell us how the integration's going?
Keith G. Block: We're thrilled with the integration. As you know, it's just our first
quarter, and we've done many, many acquisitions here. I would say that this is probably
the smoothest integration that we've had. The integration with the field, the product
teams, the marketing organizations across the board, all the lines of businesses has really,
really been fantastic. And you can't have a conversation right now with a customer
without talking about MuleSoft. Everybody wants talk about the importance of
integration as it relates to digital transformation so we're very, very happy with what's
going on.
Marc R. Benioff: Bret, you said kind of the acceleration of the public cloud combined
with customers, major investments in their own data centers is driving this integration
with cloud or what do you see as the core driver?
Bret Steven Taylor: There's so many trends happening simultaneously that is driving this
investment in integration. We have customers who want to transform their customer
experience and they're also looking to shift in their infrastructure from their own on-
premise data centers to the cloud and every customer I talk to at scale has public cloud,
private cloud, on-prem, sometimes even mainframe systems, and they can't wait for all of
that technology change to shift before transforming their customer experience. And that's
the promise of MuleSoft is we can actually transform it now. And that's why the
conversations that Keith mentioned are happening right now is all of these trends are
driving integration, sort of upleveling the discussion to integration to a strategic level.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Kirk Materne from Evercore ISI.
Stewart Kirk Materne: I'll add my congrats to Keith on his new appointment. I guess, my
-- one question, then one follow-up for Mark Hawkins. I guess, just my question was
around, Mark, some of your comments on deep learning and AI. And I was just curious
how often Einstein's coming up in these engagements you're having with the CEOs. Is
having an AI platform becoming really tablestakes to participate in this digital
transformation discussion?
And then just a quick clarification for Mark Hawkins. Mark, I assumed the guidance you
gave, the -- I guess, the FX headwind was incremental relative to what you're thinking
earlier, maybe it's become a bigger headwind since we last talked to you 3 months ago.
Marc Benioff: Thanks for the question. I mean, it's been quite few years now when we
made a strategic decision here that artificial intelligence has to be a core part of the
Salesforce Platform. Of course, we've seen so many exciting technologies emerge we
knew that had to become part of our platform on our journey over the last 20 years. But I
think AI was probably the most daunting because there's many different aspects to
artificial intelligence.
And through a lot of core native development, through acquiring companies, through
finding incredible talent, we've been able to build a phenomenal platform with Salesforce
Einstein. I don't think that there is a more successful business implementation of artificial
intelligence than Einstein -- not just core in our platform but also now in all of our core
clouds as well. I mean, you can see how Sales Cloud Einstein, our Service Cloud Einstein
or even in the Marketing Cloud helps transform the customer experience. But probably,
the most powerful is our Commerce Cloud.
When we actually turned Einstein on in the Commerce Cloud and customers have the
option to do that, but when they did turn it on, they see double-digit revenue growth
above what they were already experiencing on the Commerce Cloud; it's amazing. And
really it goes to show how the ability to take this really powerful next-generation
technology -- can have dramatic business outcomes, and we're deeply committed
artificial intelligence and we're all -- and as I said, we're also deeply committed to the
ethical and humane use of that technology because we all realize that AI is developing a
lot faster and going a lot farther than any of us realized.
And Salesforce, as I believe, probably the premier provider of artificial intelligence
certainly of business applications and enterprise applications, we still feel a deep
responsibility to help in the guidance of that capability.
And I'll turn it over to Marc.
Mark J. Hawkins: Sure, thank you. Kirk, you are correct. Yes, this is a bigger since we
had talked prior and despite the FX headwind that we see that impacted us in the second
half obviously the raising for revenue or operating margin in our cash flow.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Richard Davis from Canaccord.
Richard Hugh Davis: Maybe as a broader question for Marc Benioff. Look, there are
thousands of companies out there as you and I both know, most of them hit a wall and
often times the stumbling block is a CEO who doesn't change with the company. So
Marc, this maybe this would be a better question over a beer or whatever, but you and I
have met a bunch of private companies, but it would be super helpful if you passed on
kind of 1 or 2 key things that you've done to scale as a CEO because you've seen it. It's
CEO hold on too tight, they don't do it, this, that or the other but that would be actually --
it's not a swansong question -- but I was just curious.
Marc R. Benioff: While it's a good question. And I'll tell you in the room here is Monica
Langley, and we are working on you've probably read the book, Behind the Cloud, and
we're working on a new book right now, which we're really excited about, and we just
wrote one of the key chapters that really answers your question and I still firmly believe
that you're an entrepreneur that really the key to kind of having durable success over
multiple decades, which is what Salesforce has now done, is really maintaining a
beginner's mind.
You probably heard me talk about this, but rarely does a morning go by where I don't
take some time for mindfulness myself and really say, OK, knowing everything that's
going on in the industry, in the world, in our company, with everything that's happening,
what do I want right now? To really kind of start fresh, completely clear my mind. To
really let everything go that has happened over multiple decades. And to say, "OK. What
do I want now? Where are we going?"
And we do that -- I do that with myself -- and we do that also with our management team.
We just finished one of our major management conferences, and we take that same
approach where we really say, "OK. What is it that we really want?" And I think that's an
incredible time. We're all so connected all the time, everything's going on, getting so
much e-mail, we're all on our phones, I'm sure everyone on this call is looking down on
their phone right now and just put our phone down and stop and just be able to say OK.
Let's take a moment and then move forward.
And I don't think for -- my mentoring the other entrepreneurs is -- they need to take care
of themselves. This is the single most important thing and it starts with their beginner's
mind.
And then you'll see that new book coming soon hopefully, right, Monica?
Monica Langley: In 1 year.
Marc Benioff: In 1 year, she said, all right.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Raimo Lenschow from Barclays.
Raimo Lenschow: Congrats to Keith as well. I just had a question, Keith, for you. Now,
that you have MuleSoft in for a little bit, what has been the feedback from the salesforce
because I'm sure you could say MuleSoft is a little bit more of a technical sale, but you
guys also talked about that the whole discussion is becoming a lot more strategic. How
has your salesforce been able to kind of take on MuleSoft and integrate it into the overall
offering?
Keith G. Block: Yes, so I will just characterize it this way. Nearly universal euphoria.
And if you think about the conversations that we're having at the CEO level of, these are
all about digital transformation and the whole concept of integration just completes the
thought and the promise of digital transformation again by unlocking the data from these
legacy systems. So MuleSoft already had a very, very capable and high-performing sales
organization, which we continue to invest in. And we've been able to have very, very
tight alignment and enablement with the core Salesforce sales organization and that's just
created a lot of traction.
But again, if you think about the conversation and the dialogue that we're having with our
customers, this was a missing piece of the puzzle. And we listen to our customers. That's
why we made this acquisition because we knew exactly how important this was going to
be to completing that digital transformation. So the integration is going very, very well.
The traction is there, the alignment's there, the alignment's there, enablement is there and
the customers want this message, they want this story, they want this solution.
Marc R. Benioff: Bret, are you surprised with the kind of the rate of acceptance, the
integration cloud and what's happening is and I know you have a lot of surprises planned
for Dreamforce around that as well. Is this a shock?
Bret Steven Taylor: It's not a shock because for me, when I look at our product portfolio,
I don't view it as separate products or separate clouds; I really view it as stages of
customer life cycle, customer touch points. And we really sought an integrated transform
customer experience. Just like automation and AI are in every conversation because
every company wants a more predictive, smarter personalized experience for their
customers, every customer wants an integrated experience that pulls together all different
departments, all different legacy systems to provide an integrated view of the customer.
You want every single person who touches a customer to be able to have a single view of
the person they're talking to. And that's fundamentally what MuleSoft integration
provides. It's relevant in every single customer conversation.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Keith Weiss from Morgan Stanley.
Keith Weiss: I was wondering if we could dig in a little bit to Marketing Cloud. We've
seen a couple of quarters of acceleration there. Marc Benioff, on the last call you alluded
to benefits that you expect to see from GDPR. Are we starting to see those benefits roll
through? Or is it too early for that and there's other things?
And maybe if I could sneak in a second question. I was just wondering about sort of the
decision to open source part of the Einstein data framework. What was the sort of
rationale behind that, pushing that into the open source community? What's the benefits
you're expecting to see from that open sourcing of that technology?
Marc R. Benioff: Well, I think that number one, I mean, when I was in Switzerland last
week in a conference and I met with more than 100 of the top European CEOs and
probably in each and every conversation that I had with them, I see a deep yearning with
them to have a more complete relationship with their customer. But it's a deeper aspect of
that. They want a one-on-one relationship with their customer, especially consumer
companies, you can see that when you look at -- if you go some of the major consumer
sites and companies that we work with like Louis Vuitton or Adidas or L'Oreal or Puma
or New Balance, you can see that you're starting to have a one-on-one relationship with
the company.
That they're able to really provide a one-to-one experience with you, and that's not just in
commerce, but it's in marketing, it's in service, it's in sales and to bring in some of the
previous questions, it's intelligent, too. That is, we're using AI to make that a more
personalized experience to give you that opportunity. And that's what every company
wants to get to whether they're a B2B company or a B2C company.
It's one of the reasons I was so excited, for example, in the CloudCraze acquisition, on a
company like Adidas, a significant percentage, of course, of their commerce is B2C. We
all know that. We go on their site and we buy our Yeezys. But did you know that an even
larger percentage of their electronic commerce and B2B? That is, of course, they need to
able go and sell to all the other companies that sell Adidas and we all know who those
companies are. And that opportunity to offer a B2B and B2C experience that's one-on-
one that is really driving this phenomenal growth, especially in the Marketing Cloud.
Of course, e-mail is a key driver there and no one sends more business e-mails in a highly
personalized, intelligent way than we do. You'll also see that it drove our acquisition this
quarter of Datorama. If you haven't seen Datorama, it is an amazing company. It's a
company that through artificial intelligence is automatically able to integrate all these
different marketing automation applications. Of course, Salesforce is probably the
number 1 Marketing Cloud in the world. But there are other marketing clouds as well and
there's other marketing technologies. Datorama's able to automatically reach out to those
and then provide to the marketer automated dashboards with integrated KPIs to give them
basically an incredible opportunity to drive their marketing. That is going to be future
growth of our Marketing Cloud. I'm so excited that we're able to acquire this company
that we're able to rapidly start to integrate it into our system.
Finally, you mentioned open sourcing, a key part of our AI. We're working closely with
the entire AI community and as part of that, we believe that we are all working on
artificial intelligence together. And we are all certainly -- we benefited from the open
source community, and we're going to contribute as well back to the open source
community. That's part of our philosophy at Salesforce.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Heather Bellini from Goldman
Sachs.
Heather Anne Bellini: Marc Benioff, I just had a question about MuleSoft. You've
obviously had great success [starting] the company almost 20 years ago. But how do you
see MuleSoft, if at all, helping to modernize, if you will, your own internal IT and your
clouds? And are there new offerings, as a result of that, that you envisioned might be able
to offer to customers as you do this?
And then my follow-up was just related to you've been very vocal about how great the IT
spending environment is this year, and I'm just wondering, I know it's early but any reads
from all the customer visits you've done as you look out to next year?
Marc R. Benioff: Well, I'll hit the last part first, which is, I've never seen such a robust
spending environment. This is just a time when, and I'll just speak really to the CEO
level, I've never seen CEOs spend so aggressively. They've benefited really dramatically
from these tax cuts and also from the deregulation focus, especially in the United States.
And it doesn't matter if it's an American or European, as I mentioned, I was there last
week or an Asian CEO. I have had experiences with all of them recently and I can tell
you that, across the board, I don't know a CEO who is not aggressively spending at a
level that I have not seen them spend at before.
And probably the number 1 thing that they're spending on is their own digital
transformations. They're really positioning their companies for the future. I mean, we're
really in an incredible time. And I can -- I have been -- continue to be extremely
impressed with that. Of course, we have a tremendous offering for them as well. We have
the right product at the right time; that has really helped us.
In regards to the Integration Cloud, this is a company with MuleSoft that, of course, we
helped fund it at the beginning. I personally recruited other investors like Cisco into the
company. Board members, I really always loved the company. And then something
amazing happened last year.
I was just talking to a lot of customers and I keep hearing that integration was moving up
on their priority list. And the reason why is very simple. Everybody knows that public
clouds are becoming more dominant. We've seen this incredible growth of amazing
Salesforce Customer like Amazon and Google, 2 of our largest customers and their public
clouds. But out of our customers move to these public cloud environments, including
ours, by the way, it really motivates the integration issue because not only do they have
their data in their data centers but now they have data in multiple in most cases -- public
clouds -- as well as they're getting data from other SaaS vendors and using other public
data sources.
All of these things create an integration gambit like we've never seen before and yet
here's this company, MuleSoft, that has a radically new API-driven approach to
integration that's just phenomenal. And it's just been on a tare and all of a sudden, I just --
I turned to Keith and Bret, and they know this -- I came back from one specific customer
and I said "boy, I mean we can offer our solutions to the customer and provide an
incredible 360-degree view of the customer -- of their customer on my customer and give
them insights like never before. But we are not going to be able to do that without this
level of integration because the customer, their ability to have that 360-degree view of
their customer is in so many different places now, it's unbelievable."
So Bret, can you amplify or extend any of that?
Bret Steven Taylor: Yes, I mean, if you think about the Fourth Industrial Revolution,
really is about the pace of technology change, increasing more rapidly than we've ever
seen and I think when I talk to CIs and CIOs, the main thing they're focused on is agility,
how can we move our business more -- faster and keep pace with the change in
expectations of our consumers and this concept of the API economy and breaking your
company up into services and APIs so you can empower your business units to actually
move faster than ever before is on everyone's mind.
And MuleSoft really amplifies that strategy and really helps CEOs increase the clock
speed of their digital transformation. It's an incredible opportunity because the way they
approach it's so perfectly aligned with this concept of agility that's become so strategic in
this Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Unidentified Company Representative: I just had to ask you because obviously, you've
been here for 5 years. You've seen us do lots of acquisitions. Has there ever been an
acquisition that had the kind of rate of growth and speed and acceptance by customers
that this one has had?
Keith G. Block: We had a lot of great acquisitions, as you know. I think that this 1 is
very, very cutting, and it goes back to the comments that both of you, both you and Bret
have made. If you think historically about what is going on in the world with the legacy
debt, the processes that have built up over a decade, the technology processes, the
business processes. Companies, now more than ever, because we are in the Fourth
Industrial Revolution and we have these amazing technologies, they have to be agile,
they have to be nimble.
They have to reinvent themselves and drive new business models and if they can't get
access to the data, if they can't leverage the strength of the data that is like an ocean of
data, then they will miss out on the opportunity, and you can think about how offensive
strategy if you're a CEO or a defensive strategy, but you must do something, and that's
what we're seeing in these conversations. So that's why I get excited about MuleSoft, as I
talk to customers and I know our employees do as well because this is really an
opportunity to unlock that. So as good all these other acquisitions have been and they've
been fantastic, I'm very, very excited about this 1 and we're off to a great start.
Marc R. Benioff: And you're going to see an incredible new reveal at Dreamforce
(inaudible). Bret has done amazing work this year.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Mark Murphy from JPMorgan.
Mark Ronald Murphy: Keith, congrats to you and nice performance.
Mark Hawkins, I wanted to ask you, MuleSoft contributes $200 million to the total RPO
balance, and I'm just curious if you're able to ballpark what it would have contributed to
the current RPO balance if it was anything material?
And then also for Keith and possibly Bret, we started to hear some feedback about
underappreciated emerging jewels in the product portfolio. And in particular, those were
references to commerce with CloudCraze and CPQ with SteelBrick. A couple of your
partners are now saying that they've had the 3 big focus areas of sales, service and
marketing and that they're now can have a fourth pillar in these areas and sometimes
they're seeing the contract values are increasing 20 percent or 30 percent when a
customer adopts commerce and CPQ. So I just wanted to ask you, do you see the
ingredients for those products to surprise for the upside and possibly have that kind of $1
billion multiyear potential?
Mark J. Hawkins: So let me take the first one. Thank you, Mark. In terms of the RPO,
you're absolutely right, in aggregate, there was $200 million that MuleSoft added to our
total RPO, if you will. What I can share with you is the breakdown of that. We have
about $100 million of that in the current RPO, Mark, and then obviously, the other $100
million would be noncurrent. So that's a little bit of additional granularity that I can
provide for you.
Keith G. Block: This is Keith, obviously, to your other question, I think the success of
our sales cloud, our service cloud, and our Marketing Cloud is pretty amazing. The sales
cloud's growth is now at $1 billion plus run rate, which is unprecedented in the
marketplace. We've obviously seen great success with Service Cloud and Marketing
Cloud but all of this really speaks to our culture of innovation, whether it's our organic
innovation or our hard innovation.
And I'm very, very close with the partner community and the ecosystem. I mean, it's one
of our 3 growth levers to have the largest ecosystem in the cloud, and we'd love the fact
that our partners are investing in these elements of innovation. I mean, our partner
certifications year-over-year are up 50 percent. I think that speaks volumes about their
confidence in our solutions, whether it's in CPQ, whether it's in Commerce Cloud but all
of these are solutions.
And this is a hand in glove conversation. These are solutions that are oriented around our
industry focus, they're organized around our line of business focus. We are long gone
from the days of focusing on single clouds. We are out there driving solutions, driving
digital transformation, multi-cloud solutions, and that's why you see the great results that
we've seen in the quarter -- what you saw in Q1, what you saw at the end of the last fiscal
year and why we're so confident about the second half of the year.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ross MacMillan from RBC Capital
Markets.
Ross Stuart MacMillan: Maybe one for you, Keith, and just a follow-up for Mark
Hawkins.
Keith, you mentioned Einstein I think in a number of the descriptions of the major wins
this quarter in CPG and airlines, et cetera. And I'm just curious as to how fast that's
evolving. And we're getting to a point now where you're feeling more confident that
Einstein is an incremental monetization opportunity for the company.
And then I had a follow-up for Mark Hawkins.
Keith Block: Thanks for the comments and for the congratulations.
Einstein is an incredible product and we're at just in the beginning here. It's an incredible
piece of innovation, they put a lot of time and effort into this, we've got some amazing
talent associated with it, thought leadership and Bret's team has done an unbelievable job,
and it is part of every dialogue because customers, no matter what industry, no matter
what geography, no matter what size company you want insights and what I love about
Einstein, I mean, there's many things to love, but what I particularly love about Einstein
is its applied intelligence.
A lot of people talk about artificial intelligence in the world without really having a scope
or definition or any sort of boundary and ours is real, it's tangible, it's pragmatic, it's
practical. So it is something that's applied to fantastic CRM use cases, whether it's sales,
services, marketing, commerce, and it makes our conversation even more relevant and
our customers get even more value out of our existing products.
So we drive more value. There's an opportunity to grow deal sizes to extend relationships
to deepen relationships and there's a lot way to go, but, boy, the results are from a
mindshare perspective and early days on the money side and revenue side, we feel very,
very good about where we're going here.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of John DiFucci from Jefferies.
John Stephen DiFucci: My question's for Keith. Keith, sounds like the vertical businesses
are doing very well; they continue to do very well. Salesforce as an organization hasn't
been shy about standing up for just causes beyond the business of salesforce.com. And I
want to ask one question on one of these verticals, and it's really the public sector. And
according to what we hear, the public sector's vertical sounds like it's been doing very
well for a while here. I guess, have you seen any recent impact on that business due to
recent corporate Activision by salesforce.com? Just curious if that's affecting that
business at all.
Keith G. Block: Thanks, John. Appreciate the kind words and comments.
Look, public sector is one of our strongest verticals. It continues to be one of our
strongest verticals. Whether it's the United States government, or the U.K. government or
any government in the world of their charter is to provide a higher level of service to their
citizens. And that comes to the modernization of their legacy systems and using new
technology like ours so that they can engage with citizens in an unprecedented way, and
that's what's really fueling our growth. That business is very, very healthy, and we
support those organizations in their mission and the results speak for themselves.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Terry Tillman from SunTrust
Robinson.
Terrell Frederick Tillman: Appreciate you fitting me in, just one question. I know you
guys have the idea of durable growth over time. What I'm curious about is if you look at
the platform business, and you back out MuleSoft, the platform business has just been
chugging along well over 35 percent growth. I guess, could you talk about may be what's
been driving growth more recently in terms of is it just custom builds, extensions off of
your core cloud apps or ISV traction? Just wanting to kind of double-click more into the
strength of your platform business.
Keith G. Block: It's Keith, I'll answer this and Marc if you want to chime in, please do.
But our platform business is very strong, and you think about the capability around
Heroku, you think about capability around the core platform, you think about Shield, you
think about analytics, these are all growth drivers and difference makers for our
customers to just extend the platform. And we try to a great deal of focus and energy on
this topic, and we've executed incredibly well. So I think you're just going to continue to
see that happen.
Mark J. Hawkins: I would totally echo that. I think things like Heroku, it's really been
exciting to be able to see that group in addition to everything you called out, shield, these
are things that look really good. Even our ecosystem and what that's contributing as well
has been positive.
Mark Hawkins: And I'll just add that Dreamforce, you're going to see some amazing
extensions to the platform. We're not going to go through all of them right now, but I'm
sure you will be as blown away as I am. You saw yesterday, we also announced our lead
band for Dreamforce which is Metallica but we have a lot of other amazing entertainment
planned and speakers. Some of that we're going to be dribbling out as we head between
now and September 25 and a lot of it, you're going to see revealed for the first time
during the Dreamforce keynote. I promise all of you this will be the Dreamforce that you
will never forget. And I'll look forward to seeing all of you there. And with that.
John Cummings: Great. Thanks so much everyone for joining us today. If you have any
further questions regarding our second quarter results, please feel free to e-mail us at
[email protected]. Otherwise, we look forward to seeing many of you at our
annual Investor Day at Dreamforce on September 26. Thank you so much.
Operator: Thank you, and that concludes today's conference. Thank you all for
participating. You may all disconnect.