Even the biggest cloud gets rained on.
Fiscal second-quarter results from Salesforce late Wednesday confirmed that the largest pure-play provider of cloud-based software isn’t immune to the macroeconomic slowdown. Revenue of $7.7 billion for the quarter ended in July only narrowly beat Wall Street’s forecast, while billings, a measure of business actually transacted during the period, rose only 11% year over year to $6.9 billion. That turned out to be 5% below analysts’ forecast, which was the worst miss for that metric in at least five years, according to FactSet.