General Consultant Discussion

An interesting analysis of Salesforce.com's financials here. I must say that I continue to be mystified about how they can continue to get away with non-GAAP reporting for the market. They essentially have a stable, growing business at consistent rates. presumably infrastructure investments to meet the needs of deferred revenue commitments are allocated over roughly equivalent time frames. So I'm missing the need to continue evaluation based essentially on cash flow. It looks to me like they've been losing money for 8 quarters. Does anybody what the company and/or analysts say is the secret when they'll be GAAP-profitable? http://bit.ly/14muoVs

One of the reasons that many of these ""non-GAAP"" reporters stay afloat is revenue growth. Look at the traditional ERP which are growing maybe 4-6% vs what's quoted in this article as 27-38%. I think Netsuite, Salesforce, etc ""get away"" with this because of the revenue growth (which the article says is slowing in SFDC case). If the revenues were flat or 4-6% would there still be such wonderment by the tech and financial press? (Answer: I don't think so).

Good point. I don't track it that closely, but it seems to me that sfdc has been consistently buying other company for the past few years. So I wonder how much of the rev growth is organic?