Data analytics firm Palantir Technologies is the latest company in the crosshairs of Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s increasingly outspoken CEO.
Benioff thinks Palantir’s software is overpriced, he told CNBC at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference in San Francisco last week.
The prices that they charge to their customers; it’s got to be the most expensive enterprise software I’ve ever seen.
Moreover, Benioff indicated that, in his view, Palantir’s software lacks the functionality to justify its price point.
The CEO said: “I’ve been looking at their demos this week, saying: How do they get these prices because I thought I had analytics, I thought I had data management?”
Salesforce’s customers may be pricking up their ears at his next statement: “Maybe I’m not charging enough.” And that’s after Salesforce hiked its prices earlier this year…
Salesforce vs. Palantir: A Burgeoning Rivalry
While Palantir isn’t a brand often discussed in customer experience circles, it is a high-profile data analytics and AI company.
Indeed, it offers software to help enterprises integrate, analyze, and act on complex, organization-wide datasets.
As Salesforce continued to trumpet Agentforce and Data Cloud, the overlap has increased. Now, the two vendors will compete for contracts in the public sector, healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and beyond. As Benioff said:
We compete with them. In fact, we just won a huge deal with the US Army against them.
Yet, Palantir is not just another competitor; it’s growing fast. The company reported a 48 percent year-over-year (YoY) revenue jump during the second quarter, compared with ten percent growth at Salesforce.
That said, Salesforce’s revenue base is much bigger and more complex, so spiky growth is much harder to achieve.
Salesforce and Shaming the Competition
Over the past 12 months, Benioff hasn’t held back in his criticism of key market competitors.
For starters, he has made several jabs at Microsoft. Most recently, he criticized its old practice for bundling Teams and how that impacted Slack, before Salesforce acquired the messaging and collaboration platform. Benioff has also critiqued Copilot on many occasions, calling it “Clippy 2.0”, saying it had disappointed many customers, and accusing it of “spilling data everywhere.”
He has also had plenty to say about ServiceNow, comparing their rivalry to McDonald’s vs. Wienerschnitzel last year. With ServiceNow since launching a Unified CRM Platform and Salesforce set to enter the ITSM space, that’s a battle to watch.
Meanwhile, Benioff has even been critical about Salesforce partner OpenAI’s use of “stolen” training data.
Interestingly, that gloves-off approach may have had an unfortunate consequence: it has opened the door for competitors to go all in after Salesforce.
Kustomer has called out Salesforce’s ticket-based system “rigid” and “outdated”, while Zendesk took aim at the “surprise costs” that swarm many Salesforce implementations.
Shopify has taken a page out of Benioff’s playbook, calling out Salesforce’s “costly” business practices and boasting about poaching customers.
At the same time, CRM challenger Creatio has set itself up as a Salesforce killer, referring to a replacement campaign as a ‘Salesforce Recovery Effort’.
Yet, it’s tough at the top. Salesforce still leads the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center, the Forrester Wave for CRM Software, and IDC’s ranking of the world’s biggest CRM providers. As such, perhaps Benioff is perhaps just giving back what Salesforce has received over the years.
