'Benevolent' Salesforce claims it is 'improving the state of the world'

Chief executive Benioff talks up philanthropic work done by the cloud application player

Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff has claimed his company has a "radically different philanthropic model" to its rivals, and that the "business is improving the state of the world".

Speaking on an earnings call, Benioff (pictured) said that the enterprise cloud computing vendor aims to be a force for good in the world.

"I think that you see Salesforce trying to create a culture in an environment where we reflect what we think the future of the world is," he said. "A world where there needs to be more equality, a world where there needs to be more focus on sustainability and where there needs to be a world focused on companies that are becoming platforms for change."

Benioff boasted about the charity work Salesforce is doing and claimed this far exceeds the work done by competitors such as Microsoft.

"We've of course done about 1.3 million hours of community service," he said. "I believe we'll do even more community service this year than Microsoft, which is a company 10 times our size, because we're just very committed to volunteerism. We run over 25,000 non-profits and NGOs for free, which have been a gift of over $250m (£350m) in services to the non-profit community. And we've given away over $100m in grants as well."

Benioff, who was formerly at Oracle, said Salesforce's attitude to its customers and partners is at odds with its ERP competitor.

"When we were at Oracle, the narrative there, and the actions the behaviour, were rewarded differently," he said. "The things that we were encouraged to do, and compensated for; what we told our employees to do and what we were directing to do, is different to what we do at Salesforce. I hope that we can be an example of a benevolent company that does well and does good."

As well as talking up its efforts to make the world a better place, Salesforce also announced its financial results today for its fiscal 2016.

For the year ending 31 January, Salesforce's net loss was $47.4m, up from a loss of $262.7m in 2015. This was on sales of $6.7bn, up 27 per cent from the previous year.

This growth in sales was driven by an increase in subscription and support revenues, which were up 24 per cent.

Benioff said the results show Salesforce is outpacing its competition.

"For a top-10 enterprise software company, you all know the growth rates of Microsoft, Oracle, SAP are shrinking; negative growth rates in many cases," he said. "And here we are at a 27 per cent growth rate in this enterprise applications market... We believe that we're selling more enterprise apps than Oracle or SAP."