Salesforce Is 'Innovating Like An $8 Billion Startup'

UBS analysts Brent Thill and John Byun attended the TrailheadDX conference on Tuesday and Wednesday. Salesforce.com, inc. CRM's rebranded developer event took place in what the experts called "a slightly rougher part" of San Francisco, and was characterized a "youthful developer vibe that indicated CRM is not slowing down as it grows up."

The analysts reiterated a Buy rating and $100 12-month price target on Salesforce. The experts argued that, while the company continues to innovate in a quick and sustained fashion like many tech startups, constantly launching new features, its scale is not that of a common startup.

In fact, Salesforce boasts a market cap of over $56 billion, more than 150,000 clients and 2.8 million developers, and a revenue run rate of $8 billion. This scale “provides a solid foundation to fuel a network effect,” which helps it attract more developers and Tier 1 tech customers like Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN, Microsoft Corporation MSFT and Slack.

All of these are reasons behind why the App Cloud is Salesforce’s fastest growing Cloud, up 45 percent in the last quarter, boasting a run rate of more than $1 billion and “an important indirect benefit to other major Clouds (Sales, Service, Marketing),” the note concluded.