Salesforce is evolving from a seller of business applications into a fully fledged platform that has the potential to take on Microsoft.
On Wednesday, Salesforce CFO Amy Weaver said "seven-figure" customer deals in the latest quarter included four and a half of the company's software tools. The number of big deals that included five or more Salesforce tools grew 29% from a year ago, she added on a call with analysts.
That's a positive sign as Salesforce integrates its $28 billion acquisition of workplace chat service Slack. That huge bet is based on the idea that Slack can be the glue that binds other Salesforce apps together in such a compelling way that businesses just buy the whole software suite, rather than one or two services.
Salesforce is looking to compete with Microsoft to be the central hub for work as businesses become more digital due to remote work sticking around even as some offices reopen.
"These two companies are racing to build the post-COVID work center," said Futurum Research analyst Dan Newman.
Salesforce is playing catch-up, while Microsoft dominates with Teams chat and video conferencing, and its suite of Office 365 productivity software such as Word and Excel.
Salesforce must keep adding new tools, often through acquisitions, and then ensure that all these products work together well so customers see the value in using the whole platform, Newman said.
Wednesday's fiscal second-quarter results showed solid progress toward this goal, sending the stock up about 2% in after-hours trading. That puts the shares on course to trade at their highest level of 2021.
Salesforce COO Bret Taylor also highlighted the success of other large acquisitions, MuleSoft and Tableau. In the last quarter, Tableau was in nine of the 10 top Salesforce deals and MuleSoft was in eight of the top 10. That's an increase from the previous quarter.
This is one way the company will measure the success of Slack: how many big deals include the chat service. Salesforce unveiled its first round of Slack integrations earlier this month, including one with Tableau. The company is also seeking new use cases for Slack, whether those show up "in the context of customer service, in the context of sales, in the context of marketing," Taylor added.
"Slack has the potential to really accelerate every single product in the Customer 360," he said, referring to Salesforce's platform.
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