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Oracle appears to be gunning for Salesforce’s turf, as tech heavyweights push to lock in users to their services stack. The Austin, Texas-based IT giant, which reported a blowout quarter on Tuesday, said it is building three new applications that, it said openly, Salesforce does not have.
“We are building brand-new SaaS products using AI and also embedding AI agents right into our existing application suites,” Oracle CEO Mike Sicilia said on the company’s earnings call.
“By embracing AI with small engineering teams, we have just built three brand-new CX applications, lead generation and qualification, sales orchestration and automated selling and our new website generator… These are three products that Salesforce.com does not have.”
Salesforce is generally regarded as the leader in business software for sales and marketing. Its suite of products manages sales pipelines, automates marketing, improves customer service, runs online commerce, unifies customer data, and enables team collaboration.
“We've built these new CX products to help our customers sell, not simply to administer a forecast or generate e-mail opens,” Sicilia said.
Oracle, known for its cloud services, is beefing up its enterprise applications business. Sicilia said the company’s AI offerings are cheaper and superior to those from rivals. Cloud applications revenue was up 11% last quarter, reaching an annualized run rate of $16.1 billion.
To be sure, Oracle is much larger than Salesforce and has additional business lines such as cloud, enterprise resource management, HR software, and hardware systems. Oracle also has the advantage of getting its customers to its software stock.
Retail investors have more conviction in Oracle (Stocktwits sentiment: extremely bullish) than Salesforce (Stocktwits sentiment: bearish) at the moment. However, CRM appears to be in a much more attractive position in terms of valuation and the company’s leverage.
Analysts have a consensus price target of $275.3 for CRM (41% upside) and $250 for ORCL (68% upside), per Koyfin.
Competition between Oracle and Salesforce is heating up, according to Valoir analyst Rebecca Wettemann, Dow Jones Newswires reported. Oracle is expanding its application portfolio to directly challenge Salesforce's core offerings, while both companies are doubling down on industry-specific solutions, each vying to become the go-to framework for enterprise customers to standardize their AI use.
ORCL shares surged over 10% in early premarket trading on Wednesday, while CRM shares climbed nearly 0.5%.
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