Salesforce.com
(
CRM
) recently unveiled its latest offering Desk.com, leveraging
Heroku's cloud-platform. The company acquired Heroku in December
2010 for a $212.0 million cash in order to enhance its cloud
offerings.
Given the significant traction in cloud computing, Desk.com is
expected to transform customer support service for social and
mobile world. This will also facilitate companies to answer field
questions, complaints and compliments via Facebook, Twitter and
e-mail. This offering comes for $49 a month and is aimed toward
companies with fewer than 200 employees.
Through the Heroku acquisition Salesforce has gained one of the
four clouds that it currently offers. Through a combined
technological collaboration, Salesforce.com has developed and just
released some impressive overall numbers for 2011 which reveals
that 3,000 apps were built or installed every 24 hour. This apart,
the platform executes more than 650 million transactions per day,
which translate to 7,500 transactions per second.
We believe that this is an important addition to the company's
cloud computing portfolio, which is attracting new customers and
has the potential to support the company's revenue stream going
forward. The solution could attract many takers from the small
business groups. The company's strategy to attract new small
businesses through the solution is similar to
Intuit Inc.'s
(
INTU
) QuickBooks for ledgers and
Google Inc.'s
(
GOOG
) Adwords for online advertising.
It seems that things are going well for the company, however,
Salesforce expects that higher costs may offset revenue growth to a
certain extent. We are positive about the company's entire product
line, but are concerned about continuous R&D investments that
would somewhat rationalize the margins.
Moreover, we caution investors about strong competition in CRM
application and cloud-computing areas. Google and
Microsoft
(
MSFT
) are worthy of special mention, since they have been fighting to
win government clients at local, state and federal levels to use
their online e-mail and other applications that fit into the
cloud-computing space. Moreover, the company does not expect much
business from Europe.
Currently, Salesforce.com has a Zacks #5 Rank, implying a
short-term Strong Sell rating.
SALESFORCE.COM (
CRM
): Free Stock Analysis Report
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GOOG
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INTU
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MSFT
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