A number of reports have suggested Microsoft has dropped its bid to acquire
Salesforce.com with the most quoted reason being Salesforce's hefty $70 billion price tag, with software giant Microsoft was only willing to offer $55 billion for the cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) leader.
Microsoft's interest in Salesforce underscores its cloud ambitions. Satya Nadella, the company's CEO after Steve Ballmer, has labeled the corporation a "mobile first, cloud first" entity targeting cloud revenues of $20 Billion by 2018.
With headquarters in San Francisco, California, USA, Salesforce.com is one of the pioneer cloud-based services. Established in 1999 under the leadership of Marc Benioff and Parker Harris, a recent earnings report suggested the company recently posted revenue of $1.51 billion for the first quarter of 2015. End of year forecasts put income as being in the $6.5 billion mark for the fiscal year. Despite the revenue, the company's profits were only in the region of $4 million.
"You can see why I am so excited," suggested Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff in the company's 'Earning Call' document posted on the http://investor.salesforce.com/ website. "I am thrilled to report that we had an outstanding start to our FY16 and great building on the phenomenal momentum from last year. In this quarter we surpassed the $6 billion annual revenue run rate, and we did that faster than any enterprise software company in history," he added. "We could not be more excited. Our current outlook puts us on track to reach a $7 billion revenue run rate later this year, on the way to being the fastest to reach $10 billion, which is our dream, and something that we are very focused on. I would like to share the results from the quarter. Revenue for the first quarter rose 23% from a year ago to more than $1.5 billion. In constant currency, revenue grew even faster, at 27%."
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