Competitive Advantage

In assessing the competitive advantage of salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), I've decided to compare it to both SAP (NYSE:SAP) and Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL). SAP and Oracle both provide enterprise software solutions in the software as a service (SaaS) industry. Microsoft's Microsoft Dynamics also competes directly with salesforce.com, SAP, and Oracle, but because Microsoft Dynamics is only a small portion of Microsoft's revenue stream, I decided not to include it in this comparison.

Salesforce.com is the underdog in the enterprise software fight with a market cap of $24.69B, while SAP's market cap is $98.63B and Oracle's is $167.5B. Salesforce.com has been able to grow revenues steadily over the last ten year. And despite the fact that SAP and Oracle outperform salesforce.com in just about every key financial ratio, investors have been extremely bullish on CRM over the 5-year period and 10-year periods.

Below are some of CRM's key financial measures:

Sales	2.85 Bil
Income	-253.68 Mil
Net Profit Margin	-8.91%
Return on Equity	-14.16%
Debt/Equity Ratio	0.25
Revenue/Share	20.47
Earnings/Share	-1.79

You'll also notice that I've added quotes and a comparison chart for CRM, SAP, and ORCL on the right hand side of this page along with top stories about salesforce.com.

Salesforce.com

As part of my capstone course for the Fogelman College of Business and Economics MBA program at The University of Memphis, I have been asked to dissect the corporate strategy of the company of my choosing.  In April of 2012 Forbes published a list of the world's most innovative companies.  Their top pick?  Salesforce.com.

Salesforce.com is a social enterprise software company, whose main product is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform.   According to Salesforce.com's website, its mission states:

The Salesforce.com Foundation is based on a simple idea: Leverage salesforce.com's people, technology and resources to build collective knowledge and enable action to improve communities throughout the world. We call our integrated philanthropic approach the 1/1/1 model.

Founder Marc Benioff created the 1/1/1 model, which states that salesforce.com will donate 1% of its equity, 1% of its employees' time, and 1% of its product to improving communities around the world.

Stay tuned for will hopefully be an insightful look into a young, fast-growing, and innovative company.

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