Wedbush Upgrades Salesforce.com, Cites Opportunity To 'Disrupt Software Categories'

• Shares of salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE: CRM) have appreciated 32.19 percent year-to-date, reaching a high of $82.14 on December 4.
• Wedbush’s Steve Koenig has upgraded the rating on the company from Neutral to Outperform, while raising the price target from $79 to $96.
• Koenig expressed optimism regarding the company's commitment to margin expansion, sales momentum, market opportunity, as well as overall upside potential.

According to the Wedbush report, “President Keith Block’s moves to systematize CRM’s enterprise sales processes, target major accounts, and drive cross-selling of ExactTarget appear to be taking root this year, driving top line acceleration each quarter.”

Significant Potential Market Opportunity

The growth of the company in the platform market suggests that there could be a significant potential market opportunity. Service Cloud and the App Cloud platform have been the fastest growing product segments.

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Analyst Steve Koenig stated, “We see an opportunity for salesforce to disrupt software categories worth an estimated $21 billion in 2015 revenue.”

Media reports on December 17 indicated that salesforce was in talks to buy SteelBricks. Koenig believes that this demonstrates “the value of the company’s growing partner ecosystem.”

In fact, Koenig believes that salesforce has been gaining sufficient scale, such that most acquisitions were unlikely to be dilutive, including that of SteelBrick, which is expected to offer complementary functionality for Sales Cloud.

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