Salesforce.com CEO Talks Up New Analytics Platform As Company Barely Beats Q3 Expectations

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff was brimming with excitement about the company's new analytics platform during Wednesday's earnings call, telling investors that Wave has taken off faster than any other product in the company's history.

But shareholders weren't quite as jazzed about the CRM leader's product achievements or third-quarter financials, even though the company beat analyst expectations by 1 cent. Salesforce.com shares dropped 4 percent in after-hours trading.

Benioff kicked off the earnings call with his trademark enthusiasm, telling investors how "very, very excited" he was to be sharing "strong quarterly financial results."

[Related: Benioff Touts New Salesforce Wave Technology As 'Analytics For The Rest Of Us']

With third-quarter revenue up nearly 30 percent from the previous year to almost $1.4 billion, "no other software company is growing faster," Benioff said.

Benioff also touted the "significant advancements in enterprise technology that Salesforce is leading."

"Cloud computing is taking over our industry," he said, adding the four pillars that are changing the software industry -- cloud, mobile, social and data sciences -- are driving changes in customer interactions.

New products introduced at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference and released in the quarter are capitalizing on those trends, he said.

Salesforce1 Lightning has given the company's partners the industry's premier development platform, Benioff said. "There's no better way to build mobile apps," he told investors.

But the highlight of the quarter was Wave, the analytics cloud, which the Salesforce CEO dubbed "an incredible achievement."

"There's never been this kind of customer traction and excitement around a new product before," he said of the platform on which customers and ISV partners can build their own analytic tools.

"Analytics and business intelligence is one of the most exciting markets in the industry," Benioff told investors.

Salesforce.com President Keith Block agreed. "It's pretty clear that analytics is going to be a game-changer. I agree with Marc that analytics is going to be the most successful product launch in our company's history," Block said on the call.

Block told investors the company signed more big deals in the third quarter than ever before, naming a number of Salesforce.com 's largest enterprise customers using the new platforms and services.

Benioff said the next-generation platforms were exciting Salesforce's development community.

Sales Cloud will soon become the company's first $3 billion app cloud, he said, and Service Cloud is "pure potentiality at this point."

The success of those products contributed to Salesforce notching 159 billion transactions in the quarter, an increase of 64 percent. That translates to nearly 2.5 billion transactions every business day, Benioff said.

PUBLISHED NOV. 20, 2014