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Earnings Call: Q2 2018

Aug 22, 2017

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Doris, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Salesforce Fiscal 2018 Second Quarter Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. Thank you. I will now turn the call over to Mr. John Cummings, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.

John Cummings
SVP of Investor Relations, Salesforce

Thanks so much, Doris. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us for our fiscal second quarter 2018 results conference call. Our second quarter results press release, SEC filings, and a replay of today's call can be found on our IR website at www.salesforce.com/investor. With me on the call today is Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO; Keith Block, Vice Chairman, President, and COO; and Mark Hawkins, CFO. As a reminder, our commentary today will primarily be in non-GAAP terms. Reconciliations between our GAAP and non-GAAP results and guidance can be found in our earnings press release. Some of our comments today may contain forward-looking statements which are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. Should any of these materialize or should our assumptions prove to be incorrect, actual company results could differ materially from these forward-looking statements.

A description of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions and other factors that could affect our financial results are included in our SEC filings, including our most recent report on Form 10-Q. Let me turn the call over to Marc.

Marc Benioff
Chairman and CEO, Salesforce

Okay. Thank you so much, John. I really appreciate it. Before I begin the script and talking about our quarter, I really wanted to read you something that I sent to the company last week regarding some of the things that we've been seeing in the world. I thought it would be appropriate if we just took one minute and just allowed you to hear these words as well. The world has watched, with all of us, the horrors of the last week taking place in the United States and Spain. The pure hatred that we have seen displayed is everything we all want to end, and I've been especially disheartened to see the display of symbols of hatred, including Nazi flags and salutes to KKK hoods. The horrible, tragic death of Heather Heyer was a senseless act of terror, and this hatred must end now.

Salesforce is a company that is built on the values of love, equality, and generosity. We work hard every day to improve the state of the world through our own work and promote our company's mission to others. We all have to recommit to our own personal acts of love and kindness, as this is the only way to fight this pure hatred. We can all make our own choices between love and hate, and we can all love more. Now is the time for all of us to remember, love thy neighbor as thyself. Okay. Thank you very much for allowing me to say that. Now I'd like to move into the quarter. We had our best quarter ever, and we reached a huge milestone for the company.

As you might remember, two and a half years ago, I talked about our dream of surpassing $10 billion in revenue, and at that time, we were just on a $5 billion revenue run rate. Well, I can remember how many employees and customers and partners came up to me and said, "There's no way you're going to get to $10 billion. What kind of a dream is this?" Now, I'm absolutely thrilled that in the second quarter, we broke through the $10 billion run rate, doubling the company in such a short time. Now, Salesforce is the first enterprise cloud software company in the history of the industry to reach the $10 billion run rate. No competitor has pierced $10 billion this fast, not Oracle, not Microsoft, not SAP, and certainly not with $15 billion of deferred revenue on and off the balance sheet.

This makes Salesforce the fastest-growing enterprise software company ever to reach this milestone. This incredible achievement is now coupled with an incredible dream. We now have set our sights on $20 billion and doubling the company again. You can see today how we can get there organically with our unmatched product portfolio, world-class team, and as I mentioned, $15 billion in booked business on and off the balance sheet. While this was a phenomenal quarter of growth, we continue to improve our profitability executing at scale, and we remain the fastest-growing of all the top five enterprise software companies. Let's talk about some of the highlights of the quarter. Revenue for the quarter rose to almost $2.6 billion, which was up 26%, and we're heading fast to $20 billion in revenue.

As I mentioned, we have more than $15 billion in booked business on and off the balance sheet. That's up 29% from a year ago. In fact, we added more than $3 billion to this balance since last year. Based on these strong results, we're raising full-year top-line revenue guidance by $100 million to $10.4 billion at the high end of the range, 24% growth for this dream. I'll tell you personally, I've got dreams of 25%. This is the second quarter in a row we've raised our revenue guide by $100 million and only the third time in our history. There's a reason for our incredible success year after year and why we continue to be investing at such an incredible rate to be the number one CRM company.

It's because no other company like ours has ever been as committed to customer success as Salesforce, and that's reflected in how our customers are driving tremendous success for their customers. You all know that customer relationship management, whether it be B2B or B2C, has already become the most important and fastest growing enterprise software category, growing at nearly 14%, and that's going to come for years to come. Well, it's a massive $100 billion-plus opportunity that CRM Salesforce is leading, and we're in a phenomenal position going forward. We all see the trillion-dollar CRM opportunity in front of us. Now, we see that through our number one position, and that's because we're number one in CRM, number one in sales, number one in service, number one in marketing, and we have the number one platform, that we have a tremendous opportunity to deliver on these goals.

We're delivering this at a scale every single day, creating nearly three million sales opportunities, more than five million customer cases, sending 1.4 billion emails, processing 1 million purchases, and producing 40 million reports and dashboards every single day. That's 1 billion reports and dashboards a month, by the way. All the while, delivering more than five billion platform transactions a day. It's no wonder that Forbes just named Salesforce the most innovative company in the world again. We were the first to bring innovations like cloud and social and mobile to CRM, and now we're the first to deliver artificial intelligence to all of our customers with Einstein right inside our core platform, across all of our products. This is a massive trillion-dollar growth opportunity. According to IDC, the combination of CRM and excuse me.

According to IDC, the combination of CRM and AI will create more than 1 trillion dollars in new GDP impact worldwide, 800,000 net new jobs by 2021. Amazing. We're already seeing how Einstein is a game changer for customers, delivering hundreds of millions of critical insights, recommendations, and predictions every single day. Our biggest advantage is the more than 27,000 talented employees of Salesforce, these incredible people who are focused on making our customers successful with our products. No other company can match this level of focus on the CRM market. All of this adds up to Salesforce becoming increasingly strategic to our customers and to our partners who are trusting us to bring them into this incredible new future. You'll hear more about that in a second from Keith.

While it's only August, we're officially on the road to Dreamforce, which is going to take place in San Francisco, November 6th-9th, it's going to be the most exciting, most inspirational, and most innovative Dreamforce ever, I hope all of you can be there. You're not going to want to miss one moment. Okay, Keith.

Keith Block
Vice Chairman, President, and COO, Salesforce

Thanks, Mark. Good afternoon, everybody. As you can see from our results, Q2 was another outstanding quarter across the board. It is clear that our strong execution and commitment to customer success are enabling us to build deeper and more strategic relationships with companies around the world of all shapes and sizes. In every conversation I have with CEOs, they mention growth as their number one priority, and getting closer to their customers is a key driver of that growth. That is why leading companies like Amazon or 21st Century Fox or Jefferies Investment Bank, Samsung, all of them chose Salesforce this quarter to drive their digital transformation. One of the largest automakers is also going wall to wall with Salesforce, building a seamless brand experience for consumers across all touch points and channels. Today, eight of the top 10 automakers around the world rely on Salesforce for their digital transformations.

We also expanded with one of the world's leading logistics and transportation firms to transform the way that they deliver service to their millions of customers worldwide across every channel, social, mobile, and the web. We continue to establish and grow relationships with marquee brands and unlock new value for our customers by delivering innovative solutions and executing on three key priorities: expanding internationally, focusing on industries, and growing our partner ecosystem. Our international growth continues to represent a huge opportunity for Salesforce as we march towards that $20 billion+ goal that Mark mentioned. We continue to make significant investments in our international go-to-market resources, our operations, and our infrastructure to serve our global customers. In fact, more than 40% of our new hires year to date have been outside the U.S. In Q2, Salesforce went live on Amazon's cloud infrastructure in Canada. Very, very exciting.

Customers can now access Salesforce locally via the AWS Canada region. Amazon continues to be an incredible partner as we expand in Canada as well as Australia. These investments contributed to our outstanding international results this quarter, with constant currency revenue growth of 31% in EMEA and 27% in APAC, complementing our strong and consistent growth of 24% in Americas. In APAC, we had a very strong quarter in Japan, closing deals with established companies including Toshiba and Nomura. We had some great wins in Australia with Queensland Urban Utilities and Australia Post. In Europe this quarter, we entered into new relationships with Kering, one of the world's top luxury groups. I think everybody was excited about that one. Salesforce will be their clienteling solution across all their brands, including Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent.

We also expanded with Carrefour, the region's second-largest retailer, formed a new relationship with Groupe Auchan, and we closed a strategic Commerce Cloud deal with Sephora Europe. All good stuff. Clearly, the leading retailers of the world continue to turn to Salesforce. In fact, companies are coming to Salesforce as their trusted partner in digital transformation. Speaking of trust, we are committed to helping our customers comply with the forthcoming GDPR, including a GDPR website, a new Trailhead module, and a contractual addendum to assist our customers with compliance. This fall, we will be publishing product-specific best practices, and we will have several sessions at Dreamforce. Let us turn to industries. You have already heard about our momentum in retail. We had a great quarter with retail, and we are very proud of those results. We are also expanding our relationships in financial services with T.

T. Rowe Price, New York Life, and HSBC. T. Rowe Price chose the Financial Services Cloud to deliver personalized, highly relevant service to clients across every channel. New York Life, a great customer, doubled down, rolling out Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to another 6,000 agents and customer service specialists. HSBC will leverage Marketing Cloud globally across its retail and wealth management divisions to create personalized banking experiences for their customers. In the public sector, the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is working hard to improve services for veterans, expanded with Service Cloud, Analytics, and Platform in the quarter. Lastly, in health and life sciences, we had a very large expansion with one of the top pharmaceutical companies in the world. Today, 15 of the world's 20 largest pharmaceutical firms rely on Salesforce.

Our success in the quarter was driven by our ability to speak the language of our customers, that is translating into outstanding industry momentum for us. As Salesforce grows, so does the opportunity for our partners. Salesforce partner certifications have increased 5X in the last four years, partners are investing more in their Salesforce practices. Accenture is actually a great example. In Q2, they expanded their Salesforce capabilities in the federal market, they are also leveraging the Salesforce Platform to provide vertical solutions across many industries. I am sure you all saw the announcement that Accenture will provide trade promotion and marketing operations for Unilever, all of which is built on the Salesforce Platform. Before I close, I want to give you a quick update on the integration efforts.

We have moved quickly to integrate both products and operations across the companies that we acquired in FY 2017, including Demandware, Quip, and Krux, it is clear that our integration efforts are absolutely paying off. In the case of Demandware and Krux, these products have not only enhanced our B2C product offerings and expanded our total addressable market , they have also accelerated our growth. To close, I would like to thank our partners and our customers for their continued trust in us, of course, our 27,000 employees who are laser-focused on making our customers successful every single day. I would like to hand the call over to Mark Hawkins, who will share a bit more about our financial execution in the quarter. Mark?

Mark Hawkins
CFO, Salesforce

Well, thank you, Keith. As you have heard from Marc and Keith, we delivered a great second quarter. Revenue grew 26% in dollars 25% in constant currency, excluding a year-over-year FX tailwind of approximately $7 million. We also saw a sequential tailwind of approximately $23 million. Our portfolio of products performed extremely well in the quarter with balanced year-over-year revenue growth across the board. Sales Cloud growth accelerated to 17%, driven principally by core Salesforce automation and continued traction of Salesforce CPQ. Service Cloud continued to outpace the market with 21% growth. This is a slight uptick in growth from last quarter, reflecting the investments we have made in the product and sales enablement. Platform and other grew 32%, where we saw especially strong growth from Heroku. Marketing Cloud, excluding Commerce Cloud, grew 36%, passing the $1 billion run rate this quarter.

Commerce Cloud contributed $63 million to total revenue, with $51 million in subscription and support revenue. Dollar attrition for the second quarter, excluding Marketing Cloud and other acquired businesses, remained below 9%. We expanded our second quarter non-GAAP operating margin by 195 basis points year-over-year. In the quarter, operating margin benefited from an FX tailwind that was roughly offset by a margin headwind related to the fair value adjustments of Demandware. Non-GAAP EPS was $0.33, which was up 38% over last year. Operating cash flow was $331 million, up 32% over last year. Deferred revenue ended the quarter at $4.82 billion, up 26% in dollars and 25% in constant currency, excluding an FX tailwind of $32 million. On a sequential basis, deferred revenue benefited from an FX tailwind of $17 million. Commerce Cloud contributed $54 million to deferred revenue in Q2.

Moving on to guidance, starting with revenue. Coming out of another quarter of outstanding performance, we once again are raising our full-year FY 2018 revenue guidance by $100 million to $10.35 billion-$10.4 billion for 23%-24% growth year-over-year. We are also raising our FY 2018 GAAP diluted EPS guidance of $0.07-$0.09 and non-GAAP diluted EPS guidance of $1.29-$1.31. It's important to note that coming out of a strong second quarter, we are accelerating our investments and expanding our distribution capacity, new product initiatives, and Trailhead. These investments are set up for the long-term growth while pressuring our near-term margins. Nevertheless, we remain on track to deliver 125 to 150 basis points of non-GAAP operating margin improvement in FY 2018, despite a slight FX headwind.

These investments are critical to sustaining our long-term growth and leadership in the largest and most important market in enterprise software. At the same time, we are mindful of how important profitability is to our investors, and we remain committed to ongoing margin improvement year after year and our long-term non-GAAP operating margin target in the mid-30s. Turning to cash flow, we are maintaining our full-year operating cash flow growth guidance of 20%-21% year-over-year. Among other items, this guidance considered: 1, a strong new business in the second quarter, which drove higher cash commission obligations; and 2, the fact that Q4 is our second-largest cash collection quarter. Without the benefit of that quarter, it's difficult to further refine this full projection at this time.

That said, we are closely managing our capital expenditures in the second half of the year and now expect FY 2018 CapEx as a percent of revenue to be approximately 5%. In context, we expect free cash flow to grow faster than operating cash flow for the full year. For Q3, we're expecting revenue of $2.64 billion-$2.65 billion, GAAP diluted EPS of $0.04-$0.05, non-GAAP diluted EPS of $0.36-$0.37, and year-over-year deferred revenue growth of 18%-19%. This deferred revenue guide reflects the continued deepening of invoicing seasonality that we've been discussing for the past several years. As a reminder, this same seasonality also impacts cash flow. One final item. We are on track with our implementation of ASC 606 for Q1 of next year. We expect to talk more about this at our Analyst Day at Dreamforce on November 7th.

If you're interested in attending, please reach out to our investor relations team. To close, our second quarter wrapped up a great first half of fiscal 2018. I'd like to thank our employees, our customers, our partners, and our stockholders for their continued support. With that, we'll open up the call for questions.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, if you would like to ask a question, press star then the number 1 on your telephone keypad. Again, for any questions, that is star, then the number 1. We'll pause for just a brief moment while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question is from the line of Keith Weiss with Morgan Stanley.

Keith Weiss
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Excellent. Thank you, guys, very nice quarter. Also, Mr. Benioff, thank you for those comments. Definitely, I think it needed in these times. I wanted to ask a little bit about the margin profile for FY 2018, sticking with the 125 to 150. It's evident that with FX getting a little bit easier into the back half of the year, you guys see some incremental room for investment. I was wondering if you could drill in a little bit on the decision to sort of keep operating margin guidance where it is, maybe as a follow-up, what are those incremental investments you are planning on making to the back half of the year to offset that FX alleviation of the pressure?

Mark Hawkins
CFO, Salesforce

Great.

Marc Benioff
Chairman and CEO, Salesforce

Thank you very much for asking that question. I think that when we think about earnings, obviously, we have this incredible top-line growth, there's one word that really comes to mind, and that's balance, which is that it's incredibly important as we grow our company and exceed these incredible revenue targets, that we also continue to grow our bottom line. I'm sure that Mark will address the specifics of how much we've grown our bottom line in the last few years. One of the things that continues to be on our minds is, what are the ways that we can grow our margin while also continuing to grow our top line? We're absolutely committed to doing both. I think that's on the mind of every single member of our management team.

I think we've continued to deliver those numbers actually very well, we'll continue to do that going forward. That's also under the guise of pressure that we get from foreign exchange. Like every time the EUR increases, its valuation, it puts more pressure on our bottom line. Mark, do you want to address?

Mark Hawkins
CFO, Salesforce

Sure. Happy to do that, Mark. Thank you, Keith, for the question. I'll address both parts of it, Keith. One is the margin, and one is the specifics of where we're investing. The first thing I just want to clarify is that for the full fiscal year, we're seeing a slight headwind from an FX standpoint for the full fiscal year. That's one point I wanted to clarify. We are maintaining the 125 to 150 basis point improvement. Again, that's consistent with what the guide has been on a larger base now, as we raised the revenue another $100 million. Second time we've raised $100 million, as you know. It's on a bigger base, and consequently, we've raised the EPS by $0.01.

What we looked at in terms of the opportunity is we looked at the big opportunity that Mark has talked about of over $100 billion in TAM, and we see that opportunity with unit economics that are very attractive in the mid-30s in terms of unit operating margin economics, so we're pursuing that, obviously. We're investing and accelerating investing in distribution capacity, number 1, Keith, very specifically. Also in new product initiatives, number 2, and also Trailhead, number 3. These are three things very specifically that we're doing to really help us, even in the growth beyond this current year. That is something that we're mindful of, because this opportunity is very, very large as we described. As Mark called out, this is the fourth year in a row of operating margin expansion. We're mindful of that.

We're very focused on delivering this 125 and 150 plus the growth. Hopefully, that gives you a little complexion of both.

Marc Benioff
Chairman and CEO, Salesforce

Yeah, Keith, do you want to address it as well?

Keith Block
Vice Chairman, President, and COO, Salesforce

Yeah, I think the Marks have done a very good job articulating what our strategy is here. I think at the end of the day, we see the opportunity in the marketplace. We're already the market leader, and we're expanding our share. We're taking share. We do see that opportunity, so that means that we have the opportunity to invest and continue to invest in our innovation and our infrastructure and our customer-facing assets to capitalize on that opportunity. That's exactly what our strategy is here.

Marc Benioff
Chairman and CEO, Salesforce

I like to think of this investing in growth by design and enhancing our profitability every step of the way.

Operator

Our next question is from the line of Bhavan Suri with William Blair.

Bhavan Suri
Analyst, William Blair

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. To echo Keith, Marc Benioff, thank you for those comments. It was meaningful. I guess I'll ask my two questions quickly. One is, you've seen acceleration now for a couple of quarters in Sales Cloud. Service Cloud accelerated, despite the very healthy growth last year. Marketing Cloud on an organic basis doing really well. If you were to think about the breakout outside of cross-sell, meaning how are these clouds doing on their own? Because obviously cross-sell and Keith's business of doing the enterprise deals is helping. Is there any way to understand how these are doing on their own? I'd love to get a little color of pure Sales Cloud without the cross-sell, and its growth.

The follow-up question I had was, one of the challenges you've had over years is salespeople entering data into a CRM system, and obviously Salesforce had a huge step forward above Siebel and Vantive and the legacy solutions, and now Lightning has enabled that. Do you think, Marc, as you think about acquisitions or organic strategy, like natural language processing, the ability to talk to systems as opposed to sales guys entering data themselves, is a path you'll go? Just love to get some color on both of those. Thank you.

Marc Benioff
Chairman and CEO, Salesforce

Yeah. Well, let me take the last question first, which is that, Salesforce actually gets its data from a lot of different places. More than half of the transactions, when we talk about 5 billion transactions a day, more than half of those transactions are API transactions already. That's other computers filling our database with data. We have just amassed a huge amount of customer data, based on that. We have so many integrations and so many customers have so deeply integrated. Then there's many different ways that customers get their information into our system. Of course, we have many natural language type systems like what you've mentioned, voice type systems, like you've seen us do work with Alexa, with Amazon. I think you'll continue to see an evolution of that. One area that I'm especially proud of is mobile.

I don't think any enterprise software company has done as good a job with mobile as Salesforce. With Salesforce1, with my Salesforce1, with Salesforce Inbox, with many of our mobile offerings and mobile platform capabilities, more mobile capability than any other enterprise software company. That has really allowed customers to access and work with and input data in lots of new ways. Because mobile devices are empowered and enabled with so many, I would say, next generation capabilities, including many operating systems that have very deep AI, as you know, all of that is already tied into Salesforce. It's extremely powerful.

Keith Block
Vice Chairman, President, and COO, Salesforce

Let me try to address the first part of that question. It's interesting. I think if you look at the history of software, most companies are lucky to have a great first act. Salesforce is a company that's had a great first act with Sales Cloud, a great second act with Service Cloud, a great third act with Marketing Cloud, a great fourth act with Platform. We continue to innovate for our customers, and we speak the language of the customer. Whether it's pure play cloud innovation with add-ons, with just pure play features and functions, or it's the solutions that we assemble by vertical, the financial services industry was a particularly strong one for us this quarter, as was retail, as with HLS. This gives us the opportunity to cross-sell and upsell.

To each of these clouds by themselves would be the largest cloud company in the world, or amongst the largest cloud companies in the world. Standing alone, they're very strong. They're each a market leader. When we have the opportunity to drive digital transformation for CEOs, the walls between sales, service, and marketing come down. We have the right solutions, and that's why you're seeing these results.

Operator

Our next question is from the line of Kash Rangan with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Kash Rangan
Analyst, Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Hi, let me echo congratulations. One for Marc Benioff and one for Mr. Hawkins. Marc, when you look at your goal to double the company size to $20 billion in revenue organically, historically, you've seen some of your peers, like SAP, Oracle, struggle to maintain that hypergrowth once they hit the $10 billion mark after the ERP cycle ended. What have you been able to observe from history that gives you the confidence that you can overcome those odds and position Salesforce to be an organic growth company, even at that level at which Oracle, SAP could not maintain that growth rate? One for Hawkins. I calculated your bookings margin. By the way, your bookings growth rate, if you include the off-balance sheet backlog change and the on-balance sheet deferred revenue, your bookings grew about 39%, truly spectacular. I also calculated your bookings margin to be 30%.

I was intrigued when you said your unit economics were running in the mid-30s. Just wanted to clarify and see what you meant by that. Thank you so much.

Marc Benioff
Chairman and CEO, Salesforce

Thanks for that, Kash. I think that, number 1 for us, here we are, we're blasting through $10 billion. All of you have your models for Salesforce. You can plug these deferred revenue numbers into your models and do your calculations of where our revenue's going to be in each of the next several years. I'll tell you, we took our whole management team off-site two weeks ago to lay out our plan for what we call chapter three. Chapter one for us certainly was zero to $1 billion, was well documented in the book, "Behind the Cloud," how we did it, what we did, all of those capabilities. We want to write a second book now for entrepreneurs of what we did from $1 billion to $10 billion. We think that's an important story that needs to be told. That's certainly chapter two.

Now we're in the chapter three, which is to go from $10 billion to $20 billion. I'm sure all of you can see that's going to happen in fairly short order. I think that one of the things that we have done to focus on and make sure that we blast through $10 billion is to focus on customer success. I think a lot of mistakes that the other entrepreneurs have made, and I can go through each one, in enterprise software specifically, is not to really double down at this point, again, on the customer. Get absorbed in your own myopia, get absorbed in your corporate politics, get absorbed in your corporate bureaucracy, in yourselves, and try to break out of yourself and recognize the most important thing continues to be the customer. How do we enable that customer and empower that customer?

Of course, we're going to hold ourselves accountable, we're also going to deliver all kinds of other capabilities along the way as well. That is really our focus, which is, how do we make our customers more successful than ever? I think that's the heart of our culture. We have a great culture at Salesforce. It's a culture built on our core values of trust, of growth, of innovation, of equality. I think that nothing is more important to our company than customer success. Even though the vast majority, let's say half of the 27,000 employees that work for us today, probably were not with us two years ago.

That is something that we really have to spend time with them, that we're different than other software companies because we really care about that customer, we're going to make sure that customer is successful. When you're an enterprise software, you have to realize it's hard work. Not everything is going to be perfect all the time. There's going to be problems. That's why being so committed to the customer, I think, is more important than ever. I think that's why you're going to continue to see extraordinary growth for years to come because of this culture that's really driving it forward. Then we've coupled it with this incredible CRM opportunity, I have to say, our competitors have really done a horrible job in the last few years. I just would say that a lot of them have abandoned the CRM market.

If you talk to the major CRM analysts, we do that, we just had one of them at our management conference. They're shocked, we're shocked at how these companies have really walked out of the CRM market. Companies that had huge multi-billion-dollar positions in the CRM market have ceded that market to us. That's very exciting when we look at the huge investments that we've made, not just in product, but also distribution. More than half of our organization is a customer-facing organization. We sell directly to, service directly to the customer. That is going to serve us very well for years to come. I feel very good, I think you can see it in the numbers here. As I said, we're here forecasting 24% growth for the year. That's our official guidance. I have personal dreams of 25%. I think that would be amazing.

No software company kind of went through the $10.4 billion number at these rates. When we chart, we had a chart a couple of weeks ago, Microsoft's growth over 30 years, Salesforce's growth, Oracle's growth, SAP's growth, wow, we're really separated ourselves from those traditional growth trajectories, I feel that that's going to continue to happen.

Mark Hawkins
CFO, Salesforce

Great. Let me take the second part of the question, Kash. Thank you for the question. Kash, I haven't seen the modeling that you've done, let me disclose what we disclose, which is around the total book of business. We have a billed and unbilled deferred revenue totally at $15.2 billion. The billed portion, of course, grew 26%, the unbilled portion grew 30%, to make up that total amount of our business. As we like to think about it, that total billed and unbilled deferred revenue is obviously revenue waiting to happen over time.

The one thing I would say to you about the unit economics, if we go back to our Dreamforce presentations for the last several years, we talk about lifetime economics, the cost to book, the cost to serve, and then what that results in over time is in the mid-30s in terms of the unit economics at mature growth rates. That's what we see very specifically. That's what I can share with you, and obviously, that's against the $100 billion market that we're pursuing. That's what I would share.

Operator

Our next question is from the line of Patrick Walravens with JMP Securities.

Patrick Walravens
Analyst, JMP Securities

Great. Thank you. Marc, first of all, thank you for sharing that message and for standing up for what's morally right. That's great to see from corporate America. What I would love to hear is your thoughts on the platform strategy, how the environment has changed, and how you think the platform strategy should evolve over time.

Marc Benioff
Chairman and CEO, Salesforce

The platform strategy has evolved over time. One of the cool things for us is we have a tremendous capability with our platform. That really started with this idea that we were building these amazing CRM apps, like our sales and service app, but our customers wanted apps really designed for them. The traditional approach has been companies building vertical apps almost from the get-go and kind of creating these customizations and enhancements right inside the hard-line code. That never sat well with me, mostly because my background was in application development and deployment tools. We really built our platform in a way that let us build our core applications and let our customers extend them. That is why so much metadata has been built inside of Salesforce. I don't think a single customer The same implementation of Salesforce.

When we upgrade and update our software, which we do three times a year, we don't break links and we don't break these customizations. Customers get Einstein and Mobile and all of our enhancements. Yet they have their highly customized capability. No other company in the world has that. Even today, when most companies upgrade and update their core applications, even in the cloud, they don't upgrade all customers democratically. They give customers the warning, "Well, we're going to do this, but it's going to break your system." We don't do that. We have a way, through our metadata architecture, to really extend that. Then as we've acquired companies, we have brought that platform religion to them. When we look at all of our core products, they all have core platforms.

Platforms are incredibly important because they let customers enhance their system in a highly specialized way. Platforms are also extremely important because they drive down attrition. We just ran our numbers for this management conference that I mentioned two weeks ago. If you look at our attrition rate over the last 10 years, one of the reasons we've been able to drive it down is because of our platform. I think one of the reasons we've been able to deliver so quickly, this amazing work in financial services that Keith has led, which is the building of our Financial Services Cloud and our financial services business unit. Our success in financial services is because of our platform. When we figure out a market or a capability that we want to add or focus on, we can rapidly deliver that.

That's also true with Keith's healthcare initiative as well. That, I think, has been a very powerful part of our approach. Our platform is unique because not only, of course, do we have our core platform, which includes our Sales Cloud platform and our Service Cloud platform and our Marketing Cloud platform. We also have extensions of that platform like Heroku, which is one of the most powerful and popular application development and deployment capabilities on Amazon. We, of course, have tightly integrated that into our core platform. Customers, for example, I'm wearing this amazing new Louis Vuitton watch today. This Louis Vuitton watch is connected to something called LV Pass, which is the Louis Vuitton app that helps me manage all of my Louis Vuitton products. That is built on Heroku.

All of the CRM data for Louis Vuitton, however, is built and managed inside our core platform, and all of it is deeply integrated. When I walk into a Louis Vuitton store, they know who I am, they know all the products that I bought, like the watch or my carryall or whatever it is that I like of their products, and I'm managing it all through that Heroku app on my phone with LV Pass. That's a great example of our platform strategy, where we let customers build highly complex applications like Louis Vuitton with their Icon app, and you can see that inside any Louis Vuitton store when you go in to work with a Louis Vuitton account executive, and you can see it yourself as a consumer with Heroku when you use LV Pass on your phone. I hope that answers your question.

Keith Block
Vice Chairman, President, and COO, Salesforce

I think it's great. At the end of the day, the other thing is our partners, our ISV community.

Marc Benioff
Chairman and CEO, Salesforce

Oh, great.

Keith Block
Vice Chairman, President, and COO, Salesforce

If you look at the explosion of our ISV community, we have now gotten into a situation where our ISVs are building mission-critical apps. Just a few short quarters ago, we made an announcement of a company that is actually building clinical trial management software, which is pretty interesting, on top of our application. You probably saw the Unilever announcement, most recently with Accenture, about Accenture building CPG-related applications on our platform. It's very robust for our partner community. Of course, we have our largest ISV, which is Veeva, which is unique in the sense that it focuses just on pharmaceutical firms.

Operator

Our next question is from the line of Ross MacMillan with RBC.

Ross MacMillan
Analyst, RBC Capital Markets

Thank you very much, and Mike as well, and thank you, Marc Benioff, for the comments. One for Marc Benioff, for Keith to start with. Just on Einstein, I know it's still early days, but we started to see some bigger customer announcements like Airbus and U.S. Bank. I'm just curious as to when you think Einstein actually will start to have a material impact on your numbers, on the results. A follow-up for Mark Hawkins. We've raised revenue for two quarters here, we've raised EPS for two quarters here, we didn't raise the cash flow from operations growth guidance, and I just wondered if you could revisit that as to why. Thanks.

Marc Benioff
Chairman and CEO, Salesforce

I think Einstein has hugely exceeded our expectations, and I would say, from my perspective, it's already a material part of our results. I think it's a critical part of how we differentiate our product against now all of our competitors. We're the first company to take the robust AI capabilities, including machine intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning, and offer that to our customers in a unified CRM platform through our Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud across the board, that has really happened faster than we expected, more deeply than we've expected, and it's been more exciting for our customers than we expected. I think also the branding choice that we made with Einstein also exceeded our expectations because it let us rapidly communicate to our customers that we've extended our core platform with artificial intelligence.

As we head towards Dreamforce, you're going to see a lot of exciting things. With AI, I have seen some amazing things in financial services. I just saw some amazing things in healthcare. I'm not going to go into the details on the call, because some of the results are still early, but we've seen some amazing breakthroughs in using artificial intelligence with healthcare. I think this is going to be one of the huge new drivers of growth. You can see that the cloud was a huge driver of growth for Salesforce. Mobile was a huge driver of growth for Salesforce, and now you've got AI as this next-generation system. Every company has to look at what are they doing with AI to make their customer relationships better. I just gave you the story about Louis Vuitton.

Einstein is built into all of those apps. I can tell you that helps that Louis Vuitton account executive, when I walk in the store, they're able to give me that next best offer. I think it's probably one of the reasons that we were able to close Kering Group in this quarter, another incredible luxury brand family, with Gucci and Bottega Veneta, because we're able to offer these companies the ability to have much better, much smarter relationships, and do it so unbelievably quickly. I also just bought some amazing new sneakers on Adidas, called Primeknit shoes. If you haven't checked out some of the stuff they have, or some of the Stan Smith tennis shoes, or other Yeezy 350 that they have on Adidas, a lot of the recommendations and capabilities that you're getting already on the platform are through Einstein.

Einstein is an incredible advancement. It's great for all of our clouds. Again, I don't think the other enterprise software companies have moved fast enough into artificial intelligence.

Mark Hawkins
CFO, Salesforce

Okay. Let me pick up the second part of the question, Ross. Thank you for that. A couple things here. One is our guide. You're absolutely right. We're holding that at $2.6 billion, roughly speaking. Really two things that I would elaborate on. One is that we have a very distinct seasonality in Salesforce, where we get a lot of our cash in Q1. Then the other big cash flow quarter is in Q4. At this time, with the line of sight that we have, I think it's better to wait and get better visibility than we have today. We think it's a very solid guide, and we'll revisit that in November, number one. Number two, I would say to you that I did call out a little bit earlier in the call, I'll elaborate a little bit. We had deferred commissions.

The obligations on that on a cash basis, because we had a strong book of business in Q2, have an effect in the year, even if the expense is capitalized over a longer period of time. Obviously, we try to factor things like that into it. I'd say the third point is just as a matter of reference, if you look at our trailing 12 months of operating cash flow and revenue growth, they're pretty close together looking back. That's where we're at today. We think it's appropriate. Lastly, we are managing our CapEx tightly. We'll talk again in November.

Operator

Our next question is from the line of Karl Keirstead with Deutsche Bank.

Karl Keirstead
Analyst, Deutsche Bank

Thanks. I've got two questions on two backlog numbers. First is the 30% unbilled backlog you put up. That's a fantastic number because it's actually accelerating, I think, over the last couple of quarters, despite that number getting larger. I'm wondering if you could offer any added color. Maybe there was more multi-year deals, some larger deals. Secondly is the 18%-19% 3Q DR growth. I guess this one would be for Mark Hawkins. Mark, you mentioned that's due largely, it's obviously less than normal seasonality. Is it due entirely to the invoicing seasonality? Maybe something else going on? I know Dreamforce drops in 4Q this year rather than 3Q. Does that take any zip out of your 3Q DR growth? Thank you.

Mark Hawkins
CFO, Salesforce

Sure. Let me jump in and then maybe Keith Block or Mark Hawkins might want to add in the first one, and I'll close loop on the second one, on the 18%-19%. You're absolutely right, Karl Keirstead, the unbilled deferred revenue at 30% is a slight acceleration and a very big number in terms of growth. I think it's really reflective of a strong business that we've been describing, that Keith Block has been describing in his dialogue, a large set of deals over a long time, just overall health across geos, across clouds. Keith Block, if you want to jump more into that, I think the 30% is a slight acceleration. Karl Keirstead's absolutely right. If you want to add any more commentary, I will circle back to 18% and 19% DR.

Keith Block
Vice Chairman, President, and COO, Salesforce

Yeah, look, I think at the end of the day, the strategy around the innovation of our products is very compelling, and we're backing it up with incredible execution. I want to take you back to our three growth levers of international strategy, speaking the language of the customer, which is the industry orientation, of course, and our partner strategy. All three of those are just executing beautifully right now. We're very proud of the team, and that results in very deep relationships, very strategic relationships, multi-year relationships, multi-cloud relationships across all these different verticals. That's why you're seeing this bit of an uptick. It manifests itself in small companies and large companies. Certainly, we continue to establish these very deep, multi-year, very strategic relationships with these customers, and that's why you see these financial results.

Mark Hawkins
CFO, Salesforce

Great. Thank you, Keith. Let me just pick up the second point, Karl. In terms of the DR at 18%-19%, this is really about the deepening invoice seasonality. It just continues. One of the things that I would call out to everyone, and I think just to share with you, is that we have 12 years of history on our webpage, our IR webpage, with supplemental information that shows every quarter for 12 years and the sequential impact, because this has been a topic we've been trying to share at Dreamforce for the past several years. You can actually see the math and even fit in the guide for this quarter, and it really shows this deepening invoice seasonality continues.

The other thing that I would add, and I do think there's one little extra bit of color that I'd like to add, Karl, which is look at that trending just as it is, and then you take a look at the fact that last year in Q2 2017, we had a seasonally soft Q2 2017, and we had a seasonally strong Q3 2017. You put that, and you look at that result delivered a minus 9% quarter-on-quarter, and you'll see it perfectly on the graph. You put it in juxtaposition to this year in Q3 2018, obviously, we appropriately guided, and we had a very strong Q2. Those are things to think about as well. Bottom line, that's where we're at. That's what you should consider.

Operator

Our next question is from the line of Thomas Roderick with Stifel.

Thomas Roderick
Analyst, Stifel

Hey, gentlemen, thank you for taking my questions. Nice job on the results. Keith, you referenced a great third act here in your Marketing Cloud, and if we look at the numbers, I think you said 36% growth when you strip out the impact of Demandware. Can you just talk a little bit more about what's driving that? What sort of role is the Krux DMP playing here? How is the Demandware integration sort of served to pull through core growth on the marketing side around the B2C business? Just love to hear a little bit more about that. Thank you.

Mark Hawkins
CFO, Salesforce

Yeah. There's a lot in there, so I appreciate the question. Let me just start by saying that we're absolutely thrilled with the acquisitions that we've made, and they have worked out very strategically, not just in our financial results, but more importantly with our customers driving success. If you think about the product portfolio and our pivot here towards more vertical orientation, the assembly of Marketing Cloud plus Krux plus Demandware/Commerce Cloud is a very, very nice portfolio. If you think about the companies that we're doing business with, we talked about Kering, we talked about Carrefour, we talked about Groupe Auchan, we talked about Sephora. We just continue to ring up quite a roster of some of the world's leading retailers.

It's not just retailers, by the way, because every company is trying to go from, for example, B2B to B2B2C or directly to B2C, and that's where they buy into our vision, and what these products bring to bear. They are clearly resonating from a transformation perspective with those customers, not just in the retail space, but in other companies who are trying to become more consumer-oriented, who are trying to get more insights around their customers or just connecting to their customers, like they've never been able to do before. As far as the integrations are going, we're thrilled with the way that the integrations have gone. I think we all know that integrations can be difficult. They can be fraught with risk. There's lots of complexities associated with those integrations.

We've certainly cut our teeth on a number of acquisitions, and no integration is perfect, but I will tell you, with Krux and Commerce Cloud, we're thrilled with the way those integrations have gone, and we continue to invest in those products more than those companies would have invested in themselves had they remained standalone. Again, you're seeing it with the market penetration. Just to give you an example, Mark alluded to earlier that we're investing in our second half. Well, one of the things that we're doing is we're doubling down on the sales force associated with the Commerce Cloud because we see the opportunity for that particular product.

The net is I think we've assembled a really great core set of products, whether it's Krux individually, whether it's Marketing Cloud, which has performed marvelously for us over the last four years, or whether it's a Commerce Cloud acquisition that is resonating with our customers, and that's why you're seeing such great results.

Operator

Our next question is from the line of Sarah Hindlian with Macquarie.

Sarah Hindlian
Analyst, Macquarie

All right. Thank you very much. It's Macquarie. Thanks for taking my question, guys, and congrats on that really, really nice quarter. I want to dig into a few areas with both Marks. I'll start with you, Marc Benioff. I want to pick your brain on the overall macro backdrop and how you're seeing, in particular, the federal vertical. Are you seeing anything going on around potential debt ceilings and anything there, in regards to the federal spend? For Mark Hawkins, hi, Mark. I was going to talk to you a little bit about the channel work we're doing and finding, which is some nice early ASP uplifts from new adopters of Einstein, in particular in services and sales as well. I really want to talk to you about what your Einstein strategy, where it's evolving, and how you see that uptake impacting the financials going forward.

Marc Benioff
Chairman and CEO, Salesforce

Yeah, well, first of all, I think that you can see this great win with the Department of Veterans Affairs this quarter is an indication that the government vertical is working better than we expected. We've organized by specialized verticals. One I've mentioned was financial services, and built products there. We've also organized by healthcare. We've also built products there. A third one is government, and we've built products there. I think our win with the veterans this quarter, I think all of us know that nobody delivers better systems and better customer service than our veterans, and that's why we were so excited to be able to align with the agency to be able to build these next-generation systems for them.

Keith Block
Vice Chairman, President, and COO, Salesforce

I think we started to see government spending come back online this quarter, really for the first time. We're very excited about what the future can mean as the government looks to build next-generation systems, looks to move to the cloud, and provide better service and support to its customers.

Mark Hawkins
CFO, Salesforce

Okay. The second part, Sarah, I'm happy to take as well here, maybe, Keith, you might want to jump in too on the channel work that you were doing. I think the first thing I would say is that Einstein is early days, Sarah. With that being noted, to your point, we do see opportunity. Some of the Einstein capability is built into all aspects of our clouds, and some of it is incremental SKUs where the value is such that there'll be incremental money on those SKUs as well to deliver that specific value. There'll be a combination of those two. Everything gets smarter, and then some things will have even more SKUs that will create even more solutions for our customers, which obviously, if done well, creates great growth opportunity for us.

That's the way we think about it, and I think that's the way it'll show up in the financials. Keith, maybe you want to elaborate a little on that.

Marc Benioff
Chairman and CEO, Salesforce

Well, I want to go back to Marc's comments about the Veterans Administration. Our public sector team is one of our highest-performing organizations in the company, and they've had, over the last four years, they have done incredibly well in terms of expanding their capabilities in all branches of the government, both federal and state and local. That has been very exciting for us. I think we all know that the government is trying to undertake some sort of digital transformation. This is nothing new. It certainly started under the Obama administration, and the CIO under the Obama administration was one of our former employees, and he was very keen on introducing the cloud to the federal government. We've just picked that up and continued.

Keith Block
Vice Chairman, President, and COO, Salesforce

It's clear that the government is really trying to accelerate that digital transformation, and that's why the Veterans Administration is, yet again, another example of trying to drive that transformation, leveraging our technology.

Operator

Our last question is from the line of Kirk Materne with Evercore ISI.

Kirk Materne
Analyst, Evercore ISI

Yes, thanks very much, and congrats on the quarter. Keith, I want to follow up on a comment you made around AWS and the partnership there in Canada. When we've talked to some bigger financial institutions, data privacy has been something that's come up as maybe something that's been a bit of a glue in the machine in terms of feeling comfortable adopting Salesforce. It seems that this partnership's opening up that, and as you look across other geos, especially with, say, financial services customers, do you feel like that partnership's going to give you a lot of leverage and hopefully accelerate maybe some deals that were stuck on some localization questions? Thanks.

Keith Block
Vice Chairman, President, and COO, Salesforce

First of all, thanks for the question. It's great to hear from you. Look, we have a great partnership with AWS. They're one of our largest customers. We continue to build that partnership out with them, we're thrilled about that. Of course, we've chosen them as our platform in Canada, and plans for the second half of the year in Australia. I think there's a lot of synergies there in the eyes of financial services customers, as well as other customers outside of the industry, and we're going to continue to leverage that. Some of these customers are already AWS customers, there's a natural comfort level as well. Look, I think at the end of the day, having a set of very strategic partnerships is a great thing. Obviously, AWS is one. We have strong partnerships with others, like IBM is another.

Those things help to play out very nicely for our customers. AWS, that relationship is strong, and that just gives us a lot of flexibility as we continue to focus and expand internationally.

Marc Benioff
Chairman and CEO, Salesforce

As you mentioned, IBM, we continue to get more and more integrations with IBM. We've had some great early successes with Watson, our opportunities are to work with all these amazing companies to deliver a solution that serves our customers. I think we've probably done a better job, I think, in forming these strategic alliances and maintaining them than probably any other company in the industry. I think it's one of the reasons we've had such a great quarter. Well, anyway, thank you, everyone, for a great call. We couldn't be more excited. As I said, I think this is probably our best quarter ever. It's far exceeded our expectations. We're thrilled to raise guidance for the year and set our next dream as $20 billion, here we go. Thank you.

Keith Block
Vice Chairman, President, and COO, Salesforce

Thank you.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference call. You may now disconnect.