After laying off 8,000 employees earlier this year, Salesforce wants to rehire about 40 per cent of them again.
More than 3,300 new employees will be hired, including some recently told to clean their desks.
Workers needed include engineers, sales and cloudy experts.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that the outfit knew it had to hire thousands. This is a little odd, given that he thought he had to fire 8000 in January due to a bad case of economic headwinds and budget tightening.
Hackers have been using a zero-day hole in Salesforce email services and SMTP servers, enabling malicious actors to specifically target Facebook users.
According to Guardio Labs the threat actors used a vulnerability named “PhishForce” to conceal malicious email traffic in Salesforce’s legitimate email gateway services, capitalising on Salesforce and Meta’s size and reputation.
The attackers managed to evade conventional detection methods by “using Salesforce’s domain and reputation and exploiting legacy quirks in Facebook’s web games platform,” the researchers said.
Salesforce has unveiled plans to invest $4 billion its UK business over the next five years.
The CRM vendor claims it is experiencing rapid growth in the UK as companies invest in digital transformation and use artificial intelligence.
This latest round of capital injection builds on the company’s previous five-year investment of $2.5 billion announced in 2018.
UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak insisted the funds were a “ringing endorsement” of the UK economy.
“It will strengthen the company’s UK presence, increasing capacity, as well as creating vital jobs, reinforcing our position as one of their largest markets outside of the US,” Sunak said.
“This investment sits alongside my key priority to grow the economy and pledge to make the UK the best place in the world to start, grow and invest in tech businesses.”
Salesforce chair and CEO Marc Benioff hailed the UK as a home for “incredible” innovation, hoping his company will drive the “next wave of digital transformation in this new AI era.”
Generative AI is transforming the world of work with many companies launching their own AI products in response.
Salesforce itself released Einstein GPT, the world’s first generative AI for CRM, the vendor claims.
This month, Salesforce also announced AI Cloud, which brings together AI, data, analytics and automation to provide trusted, open, real-time generative AI that is enterprise ready.
Salesforce and its ecosystem of customers and partners in the UK is expected to create 271,700 new jobs and £52 billion in new business revenues by 2026, according to research by IDC.
A new survey of more than 500 senior IT leaders reveals that a majority (67 per cent ) prioritise generative AI for their business within the next 18 months, with one-third naming it as a top priority.
The Salesforce Generative AI in IT Survey showed the majority of senior IT leaders (57 per cent) believe generative AI is a ‘game changer.’ They believe the technology has the potential to help them better serve their customers, take advantage of data, and operate more efficiently.
This outlook is echoed even among the sceptics — 80 per cent of those who say the technology is ‘over-hyped’ agree that generative AI will help them better serve their customers.
Salesforce revenue increased 11 per cent at the end of the first fiscal quarter of 2024, reaching $8.25 billion.
Subscription and support revenues made up $7.64 billion — up 11 per cent year on year. Professional services and other revenues were $0.61 billion, an increase of nine per cent yearly.
Results also reported a first-quarter GAAP operating margin of five per cent and a non-GAAP operating margin of 27.6 per cent.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Salesforce significantly exceeded its non-GAAP margin target for the quarter – up 1,000 basis points year-over-year, and we are raising our FY24 non-GAAP operating margin guidance to a 550 basis point increase year-over-year.
Steve Corfield has been named as Salesforce’s new channel chief following the exit of Tyler Prince later this month.
A Salesforce spokesperson said: “We’re grateful to Tyler Prince for his many contributions to Salesforce and for driving significant growth in the Salesforce partner ecosystem.”
Based in the UK, Corfield has served as Salesforce’s executive vice president of industry sales and CRO for global commerce since February 2021.
He has been with Salesforce for about eight years, starting in 2015 as senior area vice president and head of sales for Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Commerce Cloud.
Another Salesforce channel executive, Dan McAllister, also posted on LinkedIn that he was now senior vice president of alliances and channels at automation vendor Boomi.
Three months ago, Salesforce announced layoffs of about 7,000 employees. The vendor has also had to work with activist investors seeking a larger profit margin from Salesforce.
Dell Technologies plans to slash its global workforce by 6,650 jobs which represents five per cent of its entire employee base.
For those who came in late, Big Tech has been making the short-term decision to improve their bottom lines by laying off staff as recession looms. This gives them the excellent opportunity to complain about not having skilled, loyal staff in two years or have their bottom lines handed to them by more agile companies staffed by the people they laid off.
In January SAP, IBM, Microsoft, Sophos, Amazon and Salesforce revealed that significant cuts were on the horizon, blaming the “economic downturn” with managers trotting out cliches like “economic headwinds.”
Sparks are expected to fly after Elliott Management made a multibillion-dollar investment in CRM powerhouse Salesforce.
For those not in the know, Elliott Management has a history of investing in companies and then forcing them to turn over more money to shareholders. It is expected that Elliott will force more layoffs at the outfit.
Salesforce has been doing well as a company but not returned enough cash to investors, which makes it ripe for activism.
In a statement Elliott Management managing partner Jesse Cohn said his outfit was ,looking forward to “working constructively with Salesforce to realise the value befitting a company of its stature.
“Salesforce is one of the preeminent software companies in the world, and having followed the company for nearly two decades, we have developed a deep respect for (Salesforce co-founder and co-chief Executive) Marc Benioff and what he has built,” said Cohn.
Public cloud service and infrastructure markets, operators and vendors’ revenue jumped 21 per cent to $544 billion in 2022.
New data from Synergy Research Group claims that the biggest growth was seen in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).
Annual revenue from these services grew 29 per cent to reach more than $195 billion, despite some headwinds from the strengthening US dollar and problems in the Chinese market.
In the other main segments, managed private cloud services, enterprise SaaS and CDN added another $229 billion in service revenues, having grown by an average 19 per cent from 2021.
Synergy said public cloud providers spent $120 billion on building, leasing and equipping their datacentre infrastructure, which was up 13 per cent from the previous year.
Never mind any skills gap, Vendors are firing staff who they may never see again to make a short-term cut in costs.
Google handed six per cent of its global workforce pink slips apparently to refocus on its priorities, including AI.
CEO Sundar Pichai said: “We’ve decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles. We’ve already sent a separate email to employees in the US who are affected. In other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and practices.”
Pichai said the company will be reviewing its current operations in order to make the most of its early investments in AI.
Salesforce is offering new Slack and Sales Cloud integration capabilities, designed to help sales teams drive productivity and efficiency and cost savings.
The Salesforce World Tour NYC event showed off the productivity discounted bundle and a new native Slack integration with the company’s Sales Cloud.
Slack VP Blake Markham said companies were seeing hiring freezes, and sales teams were seeing customers they’re selling to are experiencing similar challenges.
“Companies and their employees are focused on how to contend with [those challenges] and organisations are looking at how they can meet their revenue commitments and drive growth, while minimising expenses.
The Crown Commercial Service has agreed a one-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Salesforce.
The idea is to make it easier and more cost-efficient for the public sector to use the supplier’s products and services.
The agreement extends to the supplier’s acquired technologies, collaboration platform Slack and data visualisation provider Tableau and its cloud services.
Salesforce has acquired revenue and communications platform Troops.ai, a which uses Slack and Microsoft Teams bots to surface CRM data from platforms such as Salesforce.
Salesforce said Troops and its team will become part of Slack when the deal closes in 2023. Troops.ai had raised $19.4 million to date according to Crunchbase, including investment from Slack’s own venture fund.
The move is a surprise as Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor recently told analysts that Salesforce doesn’t have “plans for any material M&A in the near term”.
Enterprise IT spending on public cloud computing will overtake spending on traditional IT in 2025, according to research by Gartner.
This rapid shift in buying habits, driven in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, has seen widespread adoption of cloud-based infrastructures, applications and business process services. In fact, Gartner says almost two-thirds (65.9 percent) of spending on application software will be directed toward cloud technologies in 2025, up from 57.7 percent in 2022.
There is a shedload of pressure for suppliers to come up with viable options. Gartner vice president Michael Warrilow said: “Technology and service providers that fail to adapt to the pace of cloud shift face increasing risk of becoming obsolete or, at best, being relegated to low-growth markets.”
Public cloud services are expected to exceed $480 billion this year. Much of the optimism for this growth is based on the big cloud suppliers’ strategy towards industry clouds, virtualised cloud solutions based on increasing sophistication and integration of services. Last year, all three suppliers announced industry cloud strategies.
Biggish Blue has acquired Microsoft Azure partner Neudesic to expand the tech vendor’s portfolio of hybrid multi-cloud and artificial intelligence services.
IBM said that Neudesic gives it more Azure cloud, data engineering and data analytics capabilities The company has more than 1,500 cloud and data workers in the US and India.
IBM and Neudesic signed a definitive agreement for the acquisition in the fourth quarter of 2021, according to the statement.
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