Around one year ago, it was announced that Salesforce was purchasing Tableau in an all-stock deal worth just over $15 Billion. At the time, most experts were saying that Salesforce was paying too much for the acquisition and criticizing the company for the move. But with Salesforce’s latest earnings release taking place just last week, it sounds like CEO Marc Benioff has proven all doubters wrong.
The report showed that Salesforce is generating almost $5 billion in quarterly revenue. The largest segment of this is no longer their cloud services, however; today, the number one revenue-producing business within Salesforce is “Platform & Other.” This, of course, is where Tableau is categorized. This segment of the business is largely focused on analytics: an industry that Salesforce has quickly become a major player within. What is perhaps most impressive is that this business segment is growing at a rate of 62%, which is nothing short of explosive.
Complementary Systems
There are many reasons why Salesforce is seeing such great returns from their Tableau acquisition. While it may be tempting to credit the fact that Tableau is an innovative program, the reality is slightly broader in scope. Tableau complements the rest of the Salesforce services extremely well. It is a perfect fit with their cloud-focused sales and marketing tools.
Companies that partner with Salesforce for their well-known marketing tools, for example, will quickly see how they can benefit from adding Tableau onto the list of services that they purchase. Tableau will help them analyze the data they gather not only from within the cloud marketing platform, but from a diverse set of other sources as well. This type of internal cross-selling has pushed their performance forward rapidly and allowed them to not only grow existing customer relationships, but also bring on a plethora of new customers.
Growth Driven by Digital Transformation
Another thing that has helped Salesforce boost their profitability in recent months has been the rapid push for digital transformations for all types of businesses. COVID-19 has made it invariably clear that if a company is not pushing a digital-first strategy, they are leaving themselves at significant risk. This applies not only during emergency situations like the COVID pandemic, but at all times. The world has shifted to doing business primarily online, and Salesforce is helping companies keep up with these changes.
Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky commented in response to a question concerning the impact of the Coronavirus on their business, saying, “People’s realization of where they’re going has actually accelerated. So, if you weren’t a digital business four to six months ago, surely you realize that you need to be one today. And so many different businesses—whether it’s retail with stores, or a lot of other sectors—have just had to move from being either all physical or partially physical to being all digital. And I think this has really caused in a lot of places a change in the consciousness, a change in the understanding of where different industries and different companies need to get to.”
This May Be Just the Beginning
While a 62% growth rate is always impressive, Selipsky and others within Salesforce believe that this may be just the beginning. The industry is positioned perfectly for companies like Salesforce. Businesses throughout every industry and in countries around the world are pushing to move toward a more digital future. If this trend continues as it is expected to, Salesforce is ready to truly challenge the biggest names in cloud services and analytics. Of course, Trianz is here to help all companies that want to take advantage of Tableau and all the other great services that Salesforce has to offer.
Trianz has seen the power of the Salesforce & Tableau systems firsthand
While Salesforce was already a great company that offered their customers exceptional products, there is really no doubt that the acquisition has taken them to the next level. Trianz is a Salesforce Consulting Partner and has been helping our customers take advantage of all that Salesforce has had to offer for years. Since the acquisition, the level of analytics services and the type of data that they are able to access has been invaluable to many of our customers.
Matt Feyling, Vice President – New Business Development at Trianz commented on this acquisition saying, “The recent earnings report from Salesforce is certainly impressive, but in many ways, it is not surprising at all. Trianz has worked closely with Salesforce systems, including Tableau, for quite some time and it is easy to recognize the exceptional quality of all the services they provide. When working with new customers who need powerful data collection and analytics, we absolutely do not hesitate to recommend Salesforce.”
If your business is not yet working with Salesforce, the consultants at Trianz are ready to help you incorporate all their services into your overall digital strategy. Even if you are already using the popular customer management systems, we can help you set up Tableau so you can begin taking advantage of their impressive analytics services quickly.
Please contact us to schedule a consultation to go over your current setup, and how we can help you with your digital transformation by incorporating Tableau and all the great Salesforce products.
