(Reuters) -Salesforce Inc said on Wednesday it would lay off about 10% of its employees and close some offices as a part of its restructuring plan, becoming the latest company to undertake cost cuts in a challenging economy.
Link: Salesforce to cut 10% of workforce after hiring "too many people"
Clearly not selling as many mulesoft licenses and demandware licenses as they wanted to, and I wonder if force.com is also not growing.
I think Microsoft is starting to sell more deals in several areas that would impact Salesforce: Azure Integration Platform as a Service (value priced compared to Mulesoft), POWER platform (vs Force.com), and Dynamics vs. Salesforce core CRM. With Demandware also in a competitive environment vs. many other traditional and newer players
Force.com is basically their app store. I mean it’s great, but it’s not AWS or Microsoft. I’m sure they would rather it was more foundational.
Microsoft could definitely eat their lunch as Satya Nadella gets them more organized.
I could go further and say that if Satya Nadella were CEO in 1999, Salesforce would not be the company it is today.
Steve Ballmer was asleep at the switch.
I have seen force.com pushed at enterprise clients as a lo-code platform (to extend CRM, ecommerce etc.).
I have also seen force.com recommended by one of the MACH alliance vendors as the platform to use to develop call centre screens (e.g. post order support) for ecommerce solution (said solution not having suitable screens out of the box).
A lot of great people lost their jobs in this situation here. All their pricing is so expensive and I bet many of their customers are pulling back on licenses.
SaaS is a great play in boom times. In leaner times, the “pay as you go” model comes under pressure… whereas ironically traditional Enterprise software is unaffected because all your revenue was already recognized. Not that we need to go back to the bad old days of software, but there needs to be some recognition that it had advantages too.
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One of my previous employers made a point of trying to “de-SaaS” and inhouse solutions where possible, on the basis that they were big enough to run it (often to a better SLA than the SaaS), and there was a business case to spend CapEx (cheap money available) to reduce OpEx (which dropped straight to bottom line profit).
This only works if you are a very large cash generating business that has access to cheap money (although a CapEx/OpEx swap can become a mini-flywheel, using improved cashflow from reduced OpEx to fund the next round of CapEx based reductions to OpEx). And you need to not be servicing a boat load of PE created debt…
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And of course now the days of cheap money are over.
