Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome back to the Jefferies Software conference. I am your host, Brent Thill. Thanks for joining. We're here today with salesforce.com, Bill Patterson, EVP and General Manager of CRM Applications. Bill, again, runs Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Salesforce Essentials, he leads product innovation, growth and customer success across all these solutions. Prior to Salesforce, he was at Microsoft for 14 years. He was the GM of the Dynamics business at Microsoft, so has obviously extensive history in this end application market space. He's also a hockey player, so he's not afraid to skate where the puck is going. And obviously, Salesforce is skating where the puck is going. So Bill, welcome.

Maybe just to give us a sense of what brought you to Salesforce, having spent well over a decade at Microsoft. What was the most exciting thing for you to make that decision to join?

Yes. Well, first off, before I begin there. Just thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to meet you and your team. And yes, I really -- like you said, I've been in this market for a while. And having spent quite a bit of time at Microsoft prior to my time at Salesforce. And look, I think with both organizations, you have incredible groups that focus on innovation. The thing that maybe is a little bit distinct or different about Salesforce versus Microsoft is our acute focus on our values of trust and innovation and customer success and the quality. And I'll only hit the last 2 because innovation -- or, sorry, customer success really is our lifeblood. Our business model, entire business model is on the success of our customers. And so it's more than just words that we say, it's values that we live and ensuring that we're partnering deeply intimately with our customers to help them transform. And I think no more so than in is pandemic has that barely been tested. A lot of companies are really struggling right now around how they can continue to either grow or thrive coming -- managing through. And you can see Salesforce launching new products like our sales suite care offering, our Work.com offering, now working with vaccines. We're really here to help companies manage through. And I think that's just something that really speaks acutely to our values. And then last one on the basis of a quality, boy, we're in weird times, times that I never anticipated we would be in. But now these moments where technology can become a great equalizer of bringing -- serving customers, serving our communities at large. I think these are where truly being here at Salesforce and living these values every day has been incredibly not just refreshing, but so exciting for the world that we're going to create for tomorrow. So like you said, in the hockey term, skating to where the puck is, I could not be more proud of the work this team has done really to help every group, every customer, every organization trying to manage through the pandemic.

Yes. Thanks. You guys are powering Jefferies' entire front office. So our Madison project, which is salesforce.com, is a key pillar for all 4,000 employees at Jefferies. So thank you for powering that. Maybe if you can just talk about, obviously, we've heard from the company and Mark and the team, as it relates to what happened with COVID and the impact, and then the kind of the tailwind that we're seeing. We had Adobe on yesterday. We've had a number of application companies talk about digital transformation. Just give us a sense of what you're seeing from a high level end demand since this broke? And what are the primary drivers now that you're seeing that you're most excited about?

Yes. I think -- like I said, the pandemic has been -- we've done more in, I think, the last year than probably many organizations have done in the last 3 to 5. And I think that the reality is our values of helping every customer manage through this pandemic has really, I think, been at the forefront. Salesforce is a culture of action. And our values led to the actions of us creating innovation. First, by standing up and allowing companies to kind of take our technology and stand it up for response. You can imagine when businesses went to the hard shutdown last -- roughly a year ago, but in February, March time line, many organizations have that kind of -- moved their operations overnight to a large distributed world. And that meant that the service center or the contact center wasn't in a building anymore. It was in your kitchen. And some technologies weren't ready for that kind of move. And so the first wave of mobilization was just being there for our customers, allowing our customers really to take advantage of the cloud and help that be a catalyst for recovery was, I think, in the wave 1. Wave 2 was really answering a lot of the questions that many business ask us, what does reopening look like? And as you went into the spring and the summer time line around this reopening journey, it was very confusing for global companies to think about how do they mobilize pockets of maybe different geos where the virus have different rates of containment. And so our Work.com offering, our suite of offerings, is really there to help companies plan and recover and mobilize kind of coming back toward movements, where we have to have new regulations and policies and safety at the forefront of how we make decisions. And then finally, we're kind of -- we're still not out of this wave, we're in a new chapter with the vaccines. And our technology today for Work.com is helping organizations, one, in the public sector, take and create vaccine management solutions for inoculating our public. But also in the private sector, there I've had lots of conversations about kind of new policies that organizations want to embark upon, which is how do we use -- should we standardize on vaccinating our employee base? What does that ethically mean? What does that mean logistically? Is that a competitive differentiation? If we know that we've inoculated all of our employees that they can come back to work safely and feel like it's a safe endeavor to come back to the office. These are all the questions over the day. And I feel like, again, Salesforce with our focus on empowerment and speed of taking action, these are the real exciting moments that we're leading within a lot of these conversations. So COVID has been such an eye opener. And I kind of feel like we've long been talking about the words digital transformation, which means let me think about do something. But now we're actually seeing transformation really occur. But occurring in intervals that are much faster than we ever thought they would be and cycles that really require us to think in weeks and days and not months and years.

You're a hockey player. So you'll get this analogy. In Q2, I think investors got a hattrick from you. Mark really stood up and said, "Hey, we care about all you investors." Number two, he gave you the margin. And then third, he didn't do any M&A. Q3, that kind of came unraveled a little bit. The Q3 number wasn't as great as people thought. You obviously have the Slack deal. And I think a lot of people were confused why you had to do that. We won't talk about Slack right now, but maybe if you can just talk about just pipeline of what you saw, obviously, coming off the Q2, Q3 was many people talk about the calm before the Q4 storm, and I know you're 2 weeks away from closing the year, so you can't talk about the year. But just how you're thinking about overall engagement pipeline, what you're seeing across the board from clients?

Yes. I think I don't want to debate our results because I actually feel quite proud of the results the company drove for the year. And I'll speak to it in a couple of levels. First off, level of engagement. Our sellers not only conducted largely a transformation to the home. But also, we put on Dreamforce to You, an event series that used to be our big events here in San Francisco. Well, they weren't world of big events, not any longer. And so that world of big event now had to translate into acute conversations with businesses globally. But now all to the digital media and that's there. So I don't think our sales team has never been more engaged and more active than ever. I think our results, yes, we didn't see a slowdown across our core businesses. We continue to see growth across sales and service and our platform and other businesses as well. And I think what you found is we were able to manage through a lot of uncertainty because people knew that we would come through this pandemic. And like I said, a lot of companies now are really investing not just for the now moment. There were a lot of short-term transformational efforts that went on in the -- during the pandemic. But you have a lot of companies that are playing the long game and really thinking about how can they invest and come out better on the other side of this pandemic. And I think that kind of activity, especially across 4 sales teams and service teams, we saw a lot of acceleration across those kind of activities. So maybe the complexion of the deals and complexion of the engagements looked a little bit different, where maybe in prior pandemic, you're focusing on kind of efficiency kind of improvements, especially in the case of sales kind of automation. But in service, you really saw, boy, we've got to be digital. We better be contactless. We better be touchless. We better be automated. And those are the kinds of things you saw really across the 2 businesses that I run.

Drilling into Sales Cloud, that now generates an annualized $5 billion run rate. Congrats on that incredible number. But what's probably even more exciting is the growth, it's still double digits. I've been hammered for years saying Sales Cloud is going to run out of steam, and you're going to need a line shift, we'll keep going back to the hockey analogies here to keep it interesting. But there just seems like there's endless runway here. What is driving this? Why is this so sustainable?

Well, I think first and foremost, our customer base is going through a need to reinvigorate its growth strategy as well. And so you think about kind of how a lot of the world's leading businesses are operating today. The first chapter of sales side was one of efficiency, like let's get all the teams on the same page and run kind of our sales excellence kind of endeavors on the platform. And I think we've been really successful with that. But now you think about, okay, so now everyone's really efficient, how can we really unlock new growth potential? Well, we've made some smart investments in technologies like our territory optimization technologies using Einstein to really go in and hone in on growth -- acute growth strategies there. We've unlocked a lot of data with the power of Tableau to give complete new insights for propensity products of what you should sell or attaching to opportunities. And then also, if you think about really even getting further value-add with things like our industry solutions, focusing on industry solutions for financial services and health and communications. As every industry is going through some acute level of transformation today, we just keep adding new value that our customers can realize on this platform that really powers the growth of Sales Cloud into the future. So I think you're going to see, even this year, us really focus on the transformation of sales that's occurred, where you used to shake a hand to close a deal. Well, today, you don't shake hands anymore to close deals. You have to do that all through a digital metaphor. And I think now that kind of technology that we need to invent for the sales of tomorrow is something the team has been hard at working through this pandemic. So yes, I'm very bullish about that sustained growth and also looking at further acceleration opportunities there as well.

You've got the highest market share in the space. Obviously, that wasn't hard to do when you had Siebel in your way, which was an easy one to take handy from. What -- how much higher can you take share?

Well, as you know, from my history, my market share data is usually like treated in the 90s. And that's how Microsoft thinks about like market share data. Our market share is only in the 50s here at Sales Cloud. So there's a lot more runway to go after. And a couple of things that I still see. I still see a lot of growth through consolidation. So a lot of teams that like need to refactor their sales software because they're kind of growing through bringing organizations together. That's a great opportunity for sales software companies that are going through consolidation mode. I still see organizations today that operate, they're going from the departmental or divisional strategies to now kind of global strategies across their sales teams. That's a great opportunity now to refactor your sales infrastructure. So there is just a lot of change happening in the area of revenue performance management kind of operations. And I think also, you saw us launch organically, a product called Revenue Cloud in the sales domain, which is going to be the technology that helps companies manage kind of a transformation to maybe more subscription-based businesses in the future. So I just think there's so much more room to run there. And just incredibly excited to see this innovation come to light.

And for clients on the line, this is for you. Obviously, you can ask questions on the web link, which is part of the registration, you'll see the ability to ask questions. You can also e-mail me at [email protected]. I think when you go over, you had mentioned the verticalization. And the one company that really jumps out there now is Vlocity. They were in your tower, they were part of kind of the fabric they built on top of your platform. When you think about insurance and health care and all these verticals, and I know that Keith Block prior to his departure really pushed this, probably pushed Mr. Benioff a little harder on the verticalization than Mark wanted to go. When you think about where you can go now in these verticals, can you just talk to what you're seeing, and it seems like a great opportunity going forward.

Yes. The way that we run our products and our strategy here is really simple. We want to have the best products in every category we compete in. And as you know, sales and service lead the industries by not just market share, but also mind share amongst the analyst community. The second thing we want to do is offer more technologies that really speak to the mission-critical functions of a business. And in Sales Cloud parlance that would be, say, revenue cloud operations, where you're really thinking about pricing strategies, margin strategies for the products that you sell to your customers. In service, that would be field service operations, which is how do you keep your kind of products, your services, your infrastructure running and humming and operating with continuity. And then the Chapter 2 is mission criticality. And then 3, it's our product for every industry because businesses today are going through amazing transformations in every industry that we power. In telecommunications, 5G is not just a new technology for that industry. It will be a fundamental way that will create new opportunities and engagement and new opportunities to create products for the telecommunication industry that are going to power growth for the future for those organizations. And that's why with now Vlocity as part of Salesforce, our ability to kind of have these acute, focused process libraries and technology that powers more the choices that businesses in those industries need to manifest for their own strategies, their growth and retention, become just incredible tools for us to help our clients realize the value of our technology fastest. And I think that those 3 combinations, best products, mission critical products, industry products are going to power our growth well into the future. But more importantly, they're going to power the success of our customers, which keeps that flywheel going.

Bill, given your time in Microsoft, why has Microsoft had such a hard time with dynamics? I know you ran the business. It's been one of the areas that we thought they would do really well, and they've kind of perpetually underperformed, probably given your success, obviously, is the big factor that you become the leader, but what are you seeing for Microsoft now?

Yes. Well, first off, I haven't been there for 3.5 years. So I can't speak to the recency side of things. But I can tell you the essence of the 2 organizations are very different for how they operate. I think that in the case of innovation, Microsoft thinks about really the true enablement that the technology empowers, meaning the potential that exists with that technology. And they often work with partners to fully realize that potential, maybe applied to a function like sales or customer service or marketing. And I think at the essence of Microsoft is that core of running an empowered ecosystem, which means you're kind of one step removed from the application of that technology for maybe handing -- holding your customers hand to realize that value. And I think that's maybe the difference between us at Salesforce and at Microsoft is. Look, what all we do is CRM. All we do is really focus on the success of our customers. Our entire business model is predicated on customers realizing the value for our services. And so I think what you see is a company that is fully committed to the success of our customers versus a company that is focusing on empowering customers to do what they want to do maybe with the technology. And I think that I spend a lot of my time, not just kind of telling my customers what's possible. I spend a lot of my own personal time with customers, really helping them see and apply the technology to transform their business. And I think that probably speaks to a little bit to the essence of our 2 firms. Both are great companies. Both have incredible great values and both have significant contributions that they're making to the world. But I think when you compare Dynamics versus Salesforce, like you said, it's really not much of a comparison.

Yes. Let's turn to Service Cloud. It overtook Sales Cloud in terms of revenue contribution and is still growing in the high teens, low 20s. This is obviously incredible growth. What's driving this for the business? How sustainable is it? And maybe if you can tie this into the whole organic conversation versus inorganic. Some -- many investors have questioned, with all these large transactions, your ability to organically innovate. I think the Service Cloud has largely been organic. A lot of parts of the Sales Cloud have been organic. Maybe just weave that into the conversation as well.

Yes. So I'll talk on the basis of Service Cloud to start. First off, it's the largest TAM customer service software. It's the largest TAM of technology spend kind of in the domains of CRM kind of category, has the largest number of users, has the largest number of endpoints for needing to kind of automate those functions. And it is also an area that sadly, in our referral, there's just a lot of bad customer service experiences in every industry that need to be improved. And so I think on the case of Service Cloud today, a lot of organizations are understanding now that due to globalization and due to kind of commoditization of maybe some innovative parts. The way that you differentiate your brand isn't just on the basis of feature or price or those areas that can be easily replicated. It's on your service strategy, how you take care of your customers, grow your customers, retain your customers that I think makes it super strategic. So service not only has this real organic pipeline of growth behind it because it's strategic to the boardroom. It also starts to make sense of kind of the connective tissue between service and marketing teams working together for better brand performance. Service and sales teams working together to drive new growth through those moments of service that occur. So we see it in many ways as a flywheel effect where the more service that we push, the higher accretiveness that it actually drives for sales and marketing and commerce, et cetera. So I'm very, very bullish on that area. This year, we've also organically created new products like Service Cloud Voice, which is really about helping customers to transition their contact center to the cloud. Talked a bit earlier about much of the world that we saw in COVID where the home operation center basically like started out work in your kitchen or at your desk competing with your kids for internet bandwidth in your home. But this is where, again, optimizing service from home was a real big push around the Service Cloud Voice product. Connected to that, we just announced a new product that we've built here at Salesforce called workforce management, workforce engagement management, which is really thinking about how the organizations plan in a mixed mode of at-home and in-the-office for the future. And how do we ensure that we're driving better necessary quality innings there. So I think this notion that Salesforce can't organically innovate is false because we're trading products in a pandemic that are really going to serve, again, the basis of growth for Service Cloud, our largest cloud here for the future. So very, very -- I think you'll see, again, just more pipeline coming from this team, creating opportunities and value that really our customers are asking us for and that we're responding in kind.

Great. Maybe we can turn to a long list of questions from clients, so we can kind of rapidly go through these. One of the first questions is just on the topic of the executive turn. So you had CFL, Block, number of other execs kind of move around and -- just as an operator inside running a very large business, can you just give us a sense, I think universal feedback and Amy is phenomenal. And this one client that was very close to her said, she could hear cats from Texas, Minnesota and New Jersey and have them in her room in about 2 seconds. So she clearly has a magic wand to collaborate and get everyone on the same page. So we've heard great things. And what I'm hearing is that what you would share as well with what you're hearing on Amy as well as the kind of the rest of the changes, maybe…

Sure. So first off, I've never seen, and I've never worked in my career, an organization that is so well integrated. And so well, I would say just aligned. And I think part of that is kind of Mark's leadership specifically in the way that we drive complete clarity of our strategy and openness and transparency of our strategy across all levels of the company. So I think Salesforce is bigger than any one individual that you kind of operate with when you run that organization in that manner. And throughout all levels of our company, the level of cohesion and alignment and integration is I think, unparalleled in the industry. Speaking specifically about Amy, I concur and agree fully about the cat analogy. I think she would definitely herd cats from -- I think you are underselling her abilities with only the 9 states you articulated there.

And Russian.

Yes. So Amy is such an incredible leader. I think from the basis of one being grounded in our core values, especially those of equality, especially on those of innovation and trust and customer success. So I love that about her. I also think she's quite inspirational. You think about being able to run a business of this size and understand the regulatory and legal domain that this business has to thrive within to help guide our strategy. I couldn't be more excited for her to kind of ascend to the CFO position in there. Having said that, Mark Hawkins was an incredible leader as well. And what you see from Salesforce is, it's a special place. We have leadership come in and contribute and align to kind of that cohesive model that Mark runs with. Everyone contributes. Everyone has kind of a special ingredient that they add. And they leave this organization a better place as a result. So I certainly will miss Mark Hawkin's counsel and just his great energy he brought. But we're in great hands with Amy, running -- at the helm of being a CFO.

And some of the other transitions out, that has not had an impact on your day-to-day?

No. Like I said, we're kind of an organization that goes beyond any one leader. And we also -- because of that, because of the leaders that we have recruited at the senior leadership level, we're also grooming and growing talent organically in the company that I think is also really fantastic. And so that's where I just feel like we have this incredible pipeline of leaders that spend their time with us and see the sheer values that Salesforce kind of operates with. And I look at it as exporting leaders to new places, which is ultimately better for our society and technology at large.

There are a lot of questions from the clients on Slack on -- I would think that Slack immediately adds massive opportunity to both service and sales cloud in a sense of around collaboration. If I'm a customer service rep and I get a question, I don't know it, I go, hey, Bill, I got a client and needs this quick instant message. I know you've had Chatter, but you have the ability, it seems that there's new avenues for engagement that you didn't have without Slack. Can you just talk to the most exciting areas going forward, where you think this could really be a boost to both of your clouds.

When you think about the jobs that an average salesperson or average service person needs to get done to be productive and to be successful in their role. Slack makes every one of those jobs better. I mean that's simple. If I am working on developing and enriching a new lead, who better than to reach into the network of Slack to then to find people with the right avenues or connective tissues to help make an introduction. And I can do that so much faster now with Slack than I could with e-mail or a phone call or text messaging because I can put it out there for all to see. I think that Slack really becomes not just the transformation to work, but also to the transformation of how businesses communicate, both inside but also outside their organizational boundaries. And while the -- you're right, I mean, the Slack is going to make every process better for our clients. We could not be more excited in the case of sales and service to innovate there. Now the deal hasn't closed. We're still working through, obviously, kind of the integration of the 2 organizations there. But I can tell you, I'm going to have to be the adult room with my innovation team saying, in due time, we'll have great innovation because right now, we need to operate like they're a partner just like everybody else because that's just how we are going to run these things at this juncture. One thing that I don't think gets kind of talked about enough, though, is Slack as a communication platform. I mean you're talking 13 million users everyday use this platform to run their operations from. And that's not like -- that's companies -- across company boundaries and across new ecosystems. And so I think about not only just making the existing businesses that we do and the existing processes that we do run better. This could really open up incredible new innovation potential for how helping organizations communicate and get closer to their customers. And I think that's why the strategic value here is probably -- still has an incredible runway ahead.

There was a question. If you can ask Bill, whether he has divisional profitability target, sales service, do you have specific numbers, not only for top line but for bottom line.

Yes. I am -- my ability to invest in new innovation comes when I run a responsible kind of business, if you will. And I got asked this question, and the best example I can give you is in the case of our field service business. Now a year ago, field service was powered by an OEM of a company called ClickSoftware. And the way that the OEM model was working is the more I sold, the less margin I was making because I had to keep paying that OEM back to the ClickSoftware entity. We decided to make a strategic exit and acquire ClickSoftware for 2 reasons: one, better margin performance; and two, opening up the innovation potential for the field service domain for business optimization services that not only powers field service, but also can power new optimization services in the case of sales and kind of revenue performance management. So yes, I definitely take kind of margin responsibility for how my clouds operate. Because my ability to innovate and invest in the future comes by me running an efficient operation.

As a user of your product, this is a good question. A lot of the data complexity comes with user entered content. What are you doing to remove the complexity of this data so that it can be used in the most effective way?

Yes. Well, I think first off, when you -- early wave CRM systems didn't really do much with data. They just asked you for the data. And so they didn't really incent you to drive a degree of consistency for how data was entered or managed or codified in a consistent manner. And I think that's what has changed in a role of AI and intelligence and process orchestration world that we're in right now. And so what we do now is create innovation, like with our bot technology to help enrich data capture in a consistent, clear manner. So that it can actually feed AI and feed process automation to really give the user back value. And so I think that's where -- we're not in the business of data cleansing or data quality management. We have great partners that do that in our ecosystem today. But what we are doing is really making our application easier to use and more intelligent, guiding users to submit data in a clearer way so that you can get value out. And I think that really is paying big dividends, and that's kind of the technology that we have created out of our essentials offering, which today powers small business, but is having incredible benefit for our enterprise customers as well.

There's a question if you could explain the revenue cloud further, how big is this opportunity? What products are in it?

Yes. Today, so we've long been in the configure price quote market, which has roughly a TAM, and it varies based on what kind of provider you -- our total addressable market TAM of probably about $2 billion is what the market is out there today. The opportunity for configured price quotes actually is much bigger than a $2 billion market because there's a lot of adjacencies that it interoperates with, like pricing optimization or order management or better -- next best action kind of products and offerings. So what we're doing with revenue cloud is really thinking about how we take a lot of these moments for revenue optimization in the sales cycle and bringing more value to those functions. And we're also looking at some of our assets that we have like our billing technologies and looking at how we can break that into new markets with revenue cloud for billing and front office subscription management. These technologies at large, I think, are going to help many organizations that are going through both a thirst for unlocking new growth to sell higher-margin products as well as those organizations that are going through transformation to subscription, really to run those kind of operations on the Salesforce platform. So I think this potential is quite large. And I think that the next wave and chapter of Sales Cloud will just see us expand into part of that second part of our product strategy is more mission-critical functions for how businesses operate.

There's a question about the Tableau demand backdrop, especially in the back of the Alteryx-Snow partnership, we got the CFO of Snow coming up next. And the 2 are -- data definitely becoming more important and appreciate the need for 2021, meaning for data and analytics, just curious in terms of trends of what you're seeing with Tableau?

Well, 2 things that are definitely not happening is the world has not stopped generating data. And the world needs to make sense of that data in ways that are easy to consume and easy to operate. And more importantly, that you don't need a PhD always to understand. And I think that Tableau -- it's real beauty is creating incredibly engaging, beautiful experiences for understanding the data that you operate and kind of accumulate and delivering that with ease to the everyday kind of individual. So -- and I think you can see this best. Today, probably you can go about on Tableau's community sites, the data and the charts that are out there for, say, coronavirus and seeing the rate of coronavirus kind of cases and doubts and remediations in a community. Those are all running on Tableau and standardized so much so that when you saw governors during their daily reports, they are using Tableau charts to explain that to the citizens of our nation. So I think that Tableau is -- has such amazing value for not only Salesforce customers, but anyone who has needs to understand data. And I think that community, the synergy that we have with our users is incredibly profound. And I think will serve a lot of that innovation potential that you'll see just in our next chapter of explaining kind of the data that you've captured. And so I just think that's, again, how my team and the Tableau team collaborate is really putting our heads together about how we can make better sense of business information at large.

There's a question around demand trends in SMB versus enterprise. I think everyone was under the assumption, the SMB sector got hit a little harder as they were tackling other problems that they didn't have the type of dedicated teams. And so are you starting to see that demand come back in SMB? Is it back to pre-COVID levels? Maybe if you could just give us a sense of how you can split the 2 and characterize...

Yes. I've not seen the slowdown in our buying cycles of software for -- from the SMBs. And it's probably uniquely from the position I occupy, #1 in service technology. SMBs really were investing in having to retain the customers that they have. And so I definitely saw an acceleration of SMB purchases during this pandemic as a result. I also saw a lot of SMBs that were overwhelmed with demand. And so the ability for us to help automate some of their service experiences, definitely was a dynamic what I thought would much like others, we -- I wouldn't have been surprised if our SMB slowdown occurred. I just didn't experience that. And then in the case of sales, it's the same thing. Now as we sit and we're kind of dealing with different phases of this pandemic, a lot of organizations now are saying, we got to get back to growth. And so now I'm starting to see more conversations, more activity, more demand really pulling for the sales technology landscape that's out there. So I think in my 2 businesses, my SMB slowing hasn't slowed, even maybe to my surprise from what I might have read or forecasted. But I think it's probably because of the 2 places I've occupied or that I'm responsible for, really are acutely focused on the moment of need for many of these businesses.

I've got a bunch of questions in the queue on Snowflake. We had the CFO coming out up next, so we can ask Mr. Scarpelli questions, too, on this in the partnership. But obviously, Salesforce invested, you guys have a partnership. Many are asking, today, it doesn't sound like you sell each other's products, you have a technical partnership. And could there be more of an aligned go-to-market that could help benefit both of you guys.

Look, it's not my courier domain. I focus on sales and service innovation specifically. I've talked about our role of data and how data really comes together to make those decisions and make those decisions better. And the more data that you can bring into an experience, the better decisions you can make. So I definitely see a synergy, but that would be more appropriate for our Tableau folks to answer.

Probably one, I don't know if you can answer it, but I think a lot of people are concerned for Chatty. And is Chatty going to make it with Slack?

I think I don't want to -- I guess, I'm not so worried about Chatty per se. I guess what I'm saying to you, like is that every one of our processes can get better where -- with Slack. And I think that the reason is Chatter mostly focused on internal collaboration. With Slack, you have the opportunity to make things work across organizational boundaries. And so I definitely think that there's opportunity for collaboration and conversation just gets bigger with Slack in the fold. So I was trying to think of a funny joke, but maybe chatty gets chattier just because now you can include more people. And you can also include it across your organizational domain.

Okay. Don't -- so everyone that's concerned about Chatty's death will stay tuned. It seems like there's enough room. See what happens. Maybe Chatty puts a Slack hat on.

Chatty gets more hashtags. We can say that.

Yes. Sure. Yes. There's a question again, and some of this is -- I don't think we can address this. So I'm going to act as interim junior IR, but I don't think we can really take any questions around HR clearance and Slack closing and all that. So I'm going to actually handle that myself on your behalf because I think that will be the answer. So I'll take that one for you. But when you think about -- Slack does have a tremendous amount of other systems that plugs into and some of them can be competitive. So I think there's questions about will you guys continue to provide those integration links and the openness. I would assume the answer is yes because you don't want to hurt the ecosystem, but any thoughts would be helpful.

Yes. I think we've already demonstrated that strategy with technology required in MuleSoft. Where MuleSoft is an open platform for integration. I would imagine and that much of the opportunity in Slack stays the same from an integration standpoint. We have customers today that not only run on Slack, but also run on Microsoft Teams. So we, too, have to think about being more democratic around our integration strategy for sales and service solutions as well. And so I just don't -- I think that maybe we're -- what will be exciting as an innovator is to be out of this world of absolutism, which is it only works on Slack or it only works on Teams or it only works on kind of our pre-described integration balance. I think we're in a much more world of openness and value, becoming accretive, working with partners, like you talked about Snowflake, like you talked about with Slack as they're partnered today until we finish the acquisition, just like we're a partner with Microsoft. So I definitely think we're going to just continue that openness strategy because when we're more open, our customers win.

There's a question around large complex deployments and kind of the SIs coming in, and there is a large upfront cost to get that data over and board it and get the system set up. We've gone through that internally, right? That's part of the process. But I guess the question is, is this a staller then for some of these companies that realize, hey, they want to make the move. But the costs are so high for just even the SI to get it set up. What are you doing to eliminate some of those expenditures?

I think that there's always been a room for SIs to help optimize kind of capabilities. But I agree with the sentiment of the question, which is maybe in the past, it has been too complicated to get things up and running. So therefore, it's been a barrier to entry. That's where I think our move into industry solutions, meaning that you have acute technology focus on the category or the industry or the vertical that someone is -- get deployed in, there's less relevance that has to be engineered to make it fit a business. That really helps make that time to value realization to occur faster. So I definitely see that the industry move that we've created can help make that value realization number for customers occur quicker. But also it brings a level of cross-industry expertise that is also quite unique. When I work with kind of federal and public sector organizations, they don't want to work better -- they don't want to compare how they're running to other government entities. They want to understand the needs of high-tech and how high-tech is bringing transformation to those functions. And so I definitely see this move into industry solutions as not only a benefit for the initial way of bringing -- coming on to the platform, but also helps our customers at large, think about adjacencies and how they can transform their business, which is quite exciting.

We've got a few questions left, and we only got a couple of minutes. Both are around Slack. And the question was around Slack Connect and sales and service, how do you see Connect working? And also, I think this is another good one, which is those that are actually using Slack, customers are using it for customer engagement. They may not even use the Sales Cloud. One of the -- the collaborations that you're going to see between these 2, it seems like there's a great opportunity. So I guess a question around Slack Connect and then Sales Cloud customers using Slack to manage their sales teams and their customers that may not even touch the Sales Cloud.

I think Slack Connect is going to be a transformational technology for Sales Cloud and for service. And like I said before, what Slack Connect opens and the opportunity it creates is the ability to bring organizations together inside your company and outside your ecosystems, all on the same page. So you imagine in the case of, say, Sales Cloud and partner -- channel based sales organizations. Your ability to very quickly route a lead to a channel partner now happens to a hashtag as opposed to that happening through a portal that you have to log into once a week to then come find what leads have been assigned to me. So I think that business moves into the real-time kind of atmosphere with Slack Connect in -- like never before in channel sales organizations. The same thing on service. You have a lot of contractors. You have a lot of service fulfillment organizations that need to route work to people who aren't in your company. And rather than checking your e-mail once a day, you can get a real-time notice that a new job has been assigned or even emergency job needs to be performed. Again, I think that Slack Connect becomes that incredibly powerful technology to push business into this notion of real-time engagement and to really help kind of businesses kind of operate across their ecosystem and boundaries in a much more holistic sense. So again, I'm very excited to innovate on the Slack Connect platform as well. I think it opens up great potential for our customers.

And the -- just this ability that you can use Slack now to manage these relationships, are you seeing an opportunity there where that's going to play a big role in the customer outbound reach that you may not even need to touch the Sales Cloud if Slack does this chin up.

I think with Slack and Sales Cloud working together is the ultimate combination because, again, the technology of Sales Cloud is, who is your customer? What do you want to speak to them about? How do you optimize that relationship? That's super important technology, but feeding it through Slack makes it more consumable. And it makes it more real time. So that before I start any meeting, I can push data from Sales Cloud into Slack that makes me more prepared and more engaged and more productive in every meeting I attend. And so I don't think of it as an or. I certainly see that as an and, and I think this will open up incredible potential together by having a real-time engagement platform with the world's best kind of sales application, service application, et cetera.

Bill, really appreciate you joining. Congrats on all of the momentum. Looking forward to more interesting conversations ahead, especially as you tie in Slack, it's going to be really exciting. So thanks again for joining and sharing your perspective with our client base.

Yes, Brent, thanks for having me. And yes, very exciting road ahead, and I'm very excited to keep being your partner. And also powering your own front office operations. So I look for a great innovation coming to your users as well.

Great. Thank you again. Take care, everyone.

Bye.