Salesforce.com 2014 Annual Report Download - page 18

If we experience significant fluctuations in our rate of anticipated growth and fail to balance our
expenses with our revenue forecasts, our results could be harmed.
Due to the pace of change and innovation in enterprise cloud computing services and the unpredictability of
future general economic and financial market conditions, we may not be able to accurately forecast our rate of
growth. We plan our expense levels and investment on estimates of future revenue and future anticipated rate of
growth. We may not be able to adjust our spending appropriately if the addition of new subscriptions or the
renewals of existing subscriptions falls short of our expectations. A portion of our expenses may also be a fixed
cost in nature for some minimum amount of time, such as with a data center contract or office lease, so it may not
be possible to reduce costs in a timely manner or without the payment of fees to exit certain obligations early.
As a result, we expect that our revenues, operating results and cash flows may fluctuate significantly on a
quarterly basis. Our recent revenue growth rates may not be sustainable and may decline in the future. We
believe that period-to-period comparisons of our revenues, operating results and cash flows may not be
meaningful and should not be relied upon as an indication of future performance.
We rely on third-party computer hardware and software which could cause errors or failures of our
service and may be difficult to replace.
We rely on computer hardware purchased or leased and software licensed from third parties in order to offer
our service, including database software and hardware from a variety of vendors. Any errors or defects in third-
party hardware or software could result in errors or a failure of our service which could harm our business. This
hardware and software may not continue to be available at reasonable prices or on commercially reasonable terms,
or at all. Any loss of the right to use any of this hardware or software could significantly increase our expenses and
otherwise result in delays in the provisioning of our service until equivalent technology is either developed by us,
or, if available, is identified, obtained through purchase or license and integrated into our service.
Our quarterly results can fluctuate and our stock price and the value of your investment could decline
substantially.
Our quarterly results are likely to fluctuate. For example, our fiscal fourth quarter has historically been our
strongest quarter for new business and renewals. The year-over-year compounding effect of this seasonality in
billing patterns and overall new business and renewal activity causes the value of invoices that we generate in the
fourth quarter to continually increase in proportion to our billings in the other three quarters of our fiscal year.
Additionally, some of the important factors that may cause our revenues, operating results and cash flows to
fluctuate from quarter to quarter include:
• our ability to retain and increase sales to existing customers, attract new customers and satisfy our
customers’ requirements;
• the attrition rates for our service;
• the amount and timing of operating costs and capital expenditures related to the operations and
expansion of our business;
• changes in deferred revenue and unbilled deferred revenue balances, which are not reflected in the
balance sheet, due to seasonality, the compounding effects of renewals, invoice duration, invoice
timing and new business linearity;
• the number of new employees;
• changes in our pricing policies and terms of contracts, whether initiated by us or as a result of
competition;
• the cost, timing and management effort for the introduction of new features to our service;
• the costs associated with acquiring new businesses and technologies and the follow-on costs of
integration and consolidating the results of acquired businesses;
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