Mr. Marc Benioff has urged laid-off IBM employees to join cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions provider Salesforce.
Salesforce, which has headquarters in San Francisco, California, United States, was established in 1999. The company has seen considerable growth over recent years. In the fiscal third quarter of 2016 Salesforce’s performance saw revenues grow to reach $1.7 billion, increasing by 24% on the same time the previous year. Conversely, IBM has seen something of a change in fortune with a decline in revenues over the last three and a half years.
A number of reports have recently suggested that IBM is to lose a third of its United States-based employees with layoffs hitting the company’s AMS Strategic Technical Services, Global Services Parts Operations and AA IBM CMS Cloud Division departments, amongst others. While reportedly IBM still has 25,000 available vacant positions, the downsizing is a result of the company’s change in focus to the cloud and ‘Big Data’ activity. The vacant positions are reported to be in support of this change in direction.
Last Friday Mr. Benioff urged ex-IBM employees to join Salesforce. The invitation was sent from Mr. Benioff’s Twitter account and read: “Salesforce opens its hands to help @IBM and any laid off workers send us your cv.” Salesforce has, for a number of reasons, beaten analysts’ financial forecasts. The reasons for this include Salesforce’s successful departure from being a company only providing only CRM services to one with products that generate substantial revenue such as its Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud, and its recently introduced Analytics Cloud.
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