A new owner can make or break a company. Salesforce’s ownership of Mulesoft looks to be paying off all round, with the company performing “far ahead” of initial guidance, generating $431 million in revenue through calendar 2018, Salesforce’s earning show.
Nearly one year after enterprise software giant Salesforce bought the application networking specialist for $6.5 billion – in a deal Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff described as “radically enhancing innovation” – its Q4 earnings show sustained investment.
“We are absolutely thrilled by their outstanding performance” Benioff said late Monday.
(Mulesoft uses APIs to help companies re-architect their SOA infrastructure).
“To keep pace with increasing demand, we hired more than 450 additional MuleSoft employees in FY ‘19 and we nearly tripled the MuleSoft architects driving our customers’ digital transformations. We added nearly 2,000 MuleSoft developers to that ecosystem. So, it’s something we are very, very excited about.”
(Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block had openly admitted to “some healthy scepticism” about the acquisition, before being persuaded by a Fortune 100 financial services company that brought its entire management team to a meeting to discuss the challenges of accessing data from legacy systems…)
The comments came as Mulesoft generated $156 million of subscription and support revenue in Q4. (The company is bundled as “Platform and Other” in Salesforce’s earnings: a segment that grew 54 percent year-on-year.)
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Salesforce Results: Record Growth to $13 Billion
More broadly, Salesforce continued to grow at a blistering pace, generating full fiscal year 2019 revenue of $13.28 billion, an increase of 26 percent year-over-year. Of that figure, subscription and support revenues accounted for $12.41 billion.
As co-CEO Keith Block put it in an earnings call late Monday: “Our $20 million plus relationships grew 48 percent compared to last year. This includes two 9-figure renewal expansions in the quarter.”
Recent major client wins include what has been dubbed the largest technology agreement in Barclays’ 300-year history. The growth has been driven by an industry-wide shift to customer-centricity, Salesforce says.
“Whether they [customers] are B2B or B2C, they are now becoming a B2B to C company. They are all transforming to connect with their customers in all new better way… Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the largest and fastest growing market of enterprise software today, bigger than operating systems, ERPs and databases and we continue to take share and outpace this market.”
According to Edge IDC, Salesforce commands 20 percent of the overall CRM market, more than the next three competitors combined.
