In the company’s largest-ever batch of staff reductions this week, the Salesforce Inc. segment Tableau was impacted harder than some other departments, contributing to a substantial restructure that shows the $15.7 billion deal has not yet met expectations.
As part of Salesforce’s declaration that it plans to lay off 10% of its employees, Chief Executive Officer Mark Nelson was dismissed from the data analytics department in late December, as well as other top employees were also dismissed on Wednesday. Tableau witnessed higher layoffs significantly than the majority of the firm until this point.
After a decade of aggressive recruitment and hefty additions, Salesforce is attempting to lower spending and much more successfully implement the firms it has bought. The computer programmer has come under pressure from investors to maximize revenue despite losing nearly half of its worth in 2022.
Less than half of the employees employed during the outbreak were eliminated over 8,000 layoffs that have been publicly revealed on Wednesday. These came after co-CEO Bret Taylor’s declared departure in December and the termination of hundreds of sales roles in November.
The firm’s expanded employment was driven by additions. According to corporation documents, when Tableau, arguably Salesforce’s most expensive deal, was bought in 2019, it attracted 4,200 staff with it. Slack, acquired in 2021, and Mulesoft, purchased in 2018, jointly added a further 3,700.
The estimated value of the three acquisitions was nearly $50 billion, with Slack’s expected cost of $27.7 billion being by far the largest. According to staff members, layoffs hit staff badly through these acquired companies, specifically in jobs associated with customer success and recruitment.
Marc Benioff, co-founder, and CEO of Tableau addressed the new integrations in a major speech in December. Tableau is becoming increasingly seen as a visualization tool for data contained in Salesforce’s other offerings rather than as independent software. The firm’s financial results have slipped behind that of the rest of the corporation since the takeover.
“It makes a lot of sense to me that Tableau would have a disproportionate contribution to this layoff,” said John DiFucci of Guggenheim Research, who has covered Salesforce as an analyst for 12 years. “That company was not growing new business when they bought it, and they paid a lot.”
When the transaction was first disclosed, the majority of the officials mentioned on Tableau’s leadership site had recently left the organization. According to the Web Archive’s Wayback Machine, the Tableau leadership website disappeared in the midst of 2022. The Site now leads to the Salesforce leadership webpage, which displays Benioff as the company’s CEO.