On November 19, Salesforce kicked off Dreamforce, the largest enterprise software conference and, the next day, the company also held its analyst day. There are many new materials coming out of the events compared with previous years. We recommend readers to check them out (Dreamforce and analyst day). Below are our highlighted takeaways.

Analyst Day: ambitious growth target even at a large scale

The most important message that we received is Salesforce plans to double its revenue to $35 billion by FY 2024, an ambitious target which only Microsoft and Oracle had achieved. The management has laid out multiple strategies to sustain its growth at such a large scale: a) Multi-cloud, b) industry vertical solutions, and c) Acquisitions.

• Multi-cloud strategy. A top priority for Salesforce as large enterprises increasingly spread their workloads among different hyper-scale providers. Salesforce has made numerous announcements of new and expanded partnerships including AWS, Alibaba, Microsoft, and Google Cloud. Salesforce’s partnership with Microsoft was a surprise since two companies compete fiercely in the CRM market. Salesforce will move its marketing cloud to Microsoft Azure from its own data center and also integrate Teams into its Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.

• Industry verticals solutions. Have been a big focus since the company hired Keith Block from Oracle in 2013. This year we saw Salesforce doubling down. In September 2019, Salesforce announced two new vertical products: Manufacturing Cloud and Consumer Goods Cloud. In October 2019, it added a range of new products to its Financial Service Cloud. During the presentation, Salesforce management emphasized that the penetration rate of Salesforce vertical solutions is still very low. More importantly, the TAM for each vertical cloud is expanding rapidly, which gives the company ample room for growth.

• Acquisitions. Have long been the growth strategy for Salesforce. In the analyst day, Salesforce management shared some insights into its M&A track record. Take Mulesoft for example, the company managed to accelerate the growth after the acquisition.

Dreamforce: new products and partnerships 

The key theme of Dreamforce 2019 was to bring innovations of “Customer 360”, “Einstein AI” and “Data Analytics” to Salesforce’s different business segments.