The San Francisco customer relationship management (顧客關係管理)software provider Salesforce.com Inc. has completed its biggest sale to date, to Citigroup Inc.
The vendor announced the sale last week during a conference call to discuss its earnings for its fiscal third quarter, which ended Oct. 31.
"We believe this is the largest and most important CRM agreement of 2007, and our largest deal ever," Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's chairman and chief executive, said during the call.
Citi has plans to have about 30,000 financial advisers use Salesforce.com's "financial adviser desktop" application. Mr. Benioff said Citi is his company's fifth customer with 25,000 or more subscribers. The others are Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., Japan Post, Dell Inc., and Cisco Systems Inc.
The banking market is an important target for Salesforce.com, he said. Citi "is not the only transaction we signed in the financial services industry" in recent months. "We're seeing a lot of purchasing there, obviously, as well."
Salesforce.com's revenue for the quarter rose 48% from a year earlier, to $193 million. Its net income ballooned to $6.5 million, from just $339,000 a year earlier.
The figures do not reflect any revenue from Citi. Mr. Benioff said his company will begin receiving revenue from that deal when Salesforce.com hits specific goals, and that it expects to hit them this quarter.
"The revenue is ratable over the life of the agreement and is incremental," he said.
For the full fiscal year, Salesforce.com expects to report earnings of 12 to 13 cents a share on revenue of $737 million to $739 million. For the current quarter, it expects earnings of 3 to 4 cents a share on revenue of $206 million to $208 million.
Steve Cakebread, Salesforce.com's chief financial officer, said that it expects its revenue to top $1 billion in the next fiscal year.
"Our No. 1 priority will be continuing to grow," he said. "We are executing on our strategy of growing our installed base accounts, along with a strong pipeline that once again brought us an excellent mix of new business."
Salesforce.com is investing in its global sales capacity, Mr. Cakebread said. The international market "remains mostly untapped."
The company said it will provide more detailed guidance for the next fiscal year when it announces its fourth-quarter earnings in February.
In addition to earnings and customer wins, Mr. Benioff also highlighted the stability of his company's technology.
"During the third quarter our system availability exceeded 99.98%, a remarkable achievement when you consider that our transaction volume now frequently exceeds 125 million transactions per day," he said.
Salesforce.com's fiscal third-quarter transaction volume doubled from a year earlier, to 8 billion. "There is no greater measure of success than customers actively using our system," Mr. Benioff said.
Still, the company did not avoid analyst scrutiny over its security. In a letter to customers posted online this month, it admitted to a breach caused when an employee fell for a phishing scam.
"A phisher tricked someone into disclosing a password, but this intrusion did not stem from a security flaw in our application or database," the letter said.
The phisher got a list of names, employer names, e-mail addresses, and telephone numbers for Salesforce.com users and used the contact details to send fake invoices to its users, some of whom were duped, the company said. A second wave of phish e-mails included malicious software that could log keystrokes.
Mr. Benioff told analysts last week that there were phishing attacks "on less than 1% of our customers, and we have not seen any change in business because of these attacks."
Nonetheless, Salesforce.com said it is installing new technology, beginning this week, to protect itself against such scams.
Christine Barry, a research director at Aite Group LLC of Boston, said that Salesforce.com's success reflects growing interest in customer relationship management products, particularly in the banking industry. "Banks are focusing a lot more on cross-selling and better understanding their customers."Though Citi is a big customer to have, the interest extends beyond the top-tier banking companies, she said. "That's a trend from the largest financial institution down to the smallest. There's just a lot of emphasis lately on growing revenues."
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