Five years ago, valuing Salesforce meant counting seats and multiplying. That maths broke this year. In January the market decided AI agents would eat enterprise software, and roughly a trillion dollars of enterprise SaaS market value went with it, per market commentary at the time. Salesforce spent seven months as the poster child for that trade. Then it reported a quarter in which the fastest growing product is not billed by the user at all, it is billed by the unit of work completed. That's why we built Winvesta Crisps, to decode what's actually driving the companies you own, in plain language, before the consensus catches up. 60,000+ investors from all over India are already in. What about you?
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Salesforce reported adjusted earnings of $5.90 per share for its fiscal second quarter on Wednesday 26 August, against a consensus near $3.27, and the shares closed 22.6% higher the following day, per market reporting. Read the headline and you would conclude the software business had a spectacular quarter. It did not. About $2.53 of that $5.90 came from gains on strategic investments, most of it a markup on the company's stake in Anthropic, per company disclosures and analysis at The Motley Fool. Strip that out and adjusted earnings were roughly $3.37 per share, up about 16%, on revenue of $11.345 billion that grew 11%. The market bought the stock anyway, and the reason sits three lines further down the release.
🧩 What Salesforce actually sells now
The company stopped reporting the way most investors still think about it. There is no line in this quarter called Sales Cloud or Service Cloud. Salesforce now splits its subscription revenue into two buckets, and the names it chose say more than the numbers.
The first bucket, which Salesforce calls Agentforce Apps, is the business everybody knows: sales, service, marketing, commerce and Slack. It produced roughly $7.2 billion in the quarter and grew about 8% in constant currency, per the company's Q2 fiscal 2027 disclosures. The second bucket, Data 360 together with the headless platform and other products, produced roughly $3.6 billion and grew about 20% in constant currency.
Two thirds of the revenue is compounding at single digits. One third is compounding at more than twice that rate. A company that renames its entire application suite after its agent product, then reports the data layer growing 20%, is telling you where it thinks the next decade of revenue comes from.
Some of that 20% is bought rather than built. Informatica, the data management business Salesforce acquired, contributed $456 million of revenue in the quarter, $440 million of it subscription, per the company. Back that out and the data and platform line still grew, but the gap between the two buckets narrows considerably. Anyone modelling this company needs to hold both facts at once: the mix shift is real, and the acquisition flatters it.
Total subscription and support revenue was $10.820 billion, up 12% as reported and about 11% in constant currency. Total revenue was $11.345 billion. By geography, the Americas contributed $7.404 billion, Europe $2.764 billion and Asia Pacific $1.168 billion.