Of course, Salesforce is the main attraction for Starboard, but let’s look at the companies one by one to see why the investor thinks each is not living up to its true potential.
Starboard is taking a hard look at three tech retailers for what it sees as underperformance: The CRM major, of course, but also Wix and Splunk. A more diverse group of companies is hard to find in the tech market.
Salesforce needs little introduction at its current size, but Wix and Splunk are very different beasts. Wix is an Internet site builder for people who need a website without having to get overly involved with programming or design. Splunk is a software company that focuses on processing log data, such as for security issues or events that impact efficiency.
Salesforce is best known for CRM, its true core product. But it’s much more than that, offering advertising and marketing tools, service components, and too many other topics to mention. In recent years, Salesforce has used its considerable assets to maneuver into adjacent areas. For example, the company has spent nearly $50 billion to acquire Slack ($27.7 billion), Tableau ($15.7 billion) and MuleSoft ($6.5 billion), among others.
What bothers Starboard about Salesforce’s efficiency? The large investment firm has a whole host of issues with the CRM king, citing its “primary marketplace” in numerous sectors, which we agree with.
However, when Starboard goes into the company’s long-term plans, it’s perplexed that Salesforce is giving up slower development than particular friends – not an enormous shock, on condition that it has a much larger scale – however not with compensating improvement within the pace at which it generates a working margin.