Mulesoft, Tableau uptake fuels Salesforce growth spurt

Despite a tumultuous couple of months, strong user uptake of Tableau .

Mulesoft, Tableau outperform company expectations

Mulesoft and Tableau outperformed the company’s own expectations, said company CFO Amy Weaver, also speaking on the call.

Benioff also told analysts that customer revenue attrition was at its lowest level in the company’s history, ending the quarter below 7.5%.

Fourth-quarter subscription and support revenue was up 14% year on year to $7.8 billion, while professional services and other revenue totaled $600 million, an increase of 19%. The results helped boost Salesforce’s total revenue for financial year 2023 to $31.4 billion, a year-on-year increase of 18%.

Despite the revenue gains, Salesforce posted a fourth-quarter loss of $98 million, compared with a loss of $28 million in the same quarter last year, due mainly to restructuring costs that included layoff-related expenses.

The previous 90 days haven’t been smooth sailing for Salesforce. During the quarter, the company and , Salesforce blamed the need for layoffs on a hiring spree during the pandemic — when the need to go remote spurred corporate demand for cloud services and collaboration software — that was followed by weakening demand last year as a result of macroeconomic issues including inflation and supply chain disruptions.

Salesforce touts soon-to-be-launched EinsteinGPT

Looking ahead, Benioff said that Salesforce’s upcoming EinsteinGPT offering will soon integrate with all Salesforce cloud products, including those from its Tableau, MuleSoft and Slack subsidiaries. He added that EinsteinGPT, which Salesforce is set to unveil next week, will complement the company’s Einstein AI technology, which offers predictive analytics and allows for voice control of software, and which presents an opportunity for other Salesforce products, Benioff said.

“We‘ve always been influenced by the world of AI and IoT and seeing our customers try to add in all of their intelligent devices onto our platform so they can have better relationships with their customers who are connected to them in these incredible new ways,” he said.

Benioff’s comments come in the same week that to preview users in Windows 11.