Salesforce.com Announces Lightning to Enhance Its Sales Cloud
Salesforce Lightning’s revamped UI
In the prior part of this series, we discussed Salesforce.com’s (CRM) launch of the Lightning platform for Sales Cloud. With Lightning Experience, Salesforce claims streamlined access to the existing features on mobile and desktop PC platforms, as well as the addition of 25 new features. Microsoft (MSFT) Windows dominates the desktop PC space.
New features include a new home screen, a customizable sales dashboard, and a workspace that shows an overview of work done with each customer.
New home page
The new home page features a Pipeline Board, which provides a visual representation of deals in progress. Salesforce stated that the enhancements are designed to simplify the direct access to features. For instance, if it previously required three clicks to complete an action, the new UI (or user interface) can be accomplished with a single click. We also discussed its first vertical-specific offering Financial Services cloud, the company’s initiative to target the high-value sector.
Through Lightning Experience, Salesforce has aimed to overhaul the user interface (or UI) design of its CRM platform. The company stated that the Lightning Experience user interface will provide developers a streamlined way to create apps for the core Sales Cloud, as well as enabling its corporate customers to add components to the CRM system.
Sales Cloud reported 10% YoY growth
Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, a web-based application that enables companies to leverage multichannel relationships for growth, reported $671 million in revenues. It reported 10% growth on a year-over-year basis in fiscal 2Q16. It contributed ~41% toward Salesforce’s overall revenues in fiscal 2Q16.
According to a report from Gartner, Salesforce.com leads global CRM software vendors with a 18.4% market share in 2014, as the above chart shows. It’s followed in the CRM space by SAP (SAP) and Oracle (ORCL), which in 2014 held 12.1% and 9.2% market shares, respectively. Also, Salesforce.com reported the highest revenue growth of 28.2% from 2013–2014. Another leading player in this space, Microsoft (MSFT) reported 21.7% growth in the same timeframe.
You can consider investing in the Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLK) to gain exposure to Salesforce. XLK invests about 1.07% of its holdings in Salesforce.
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