Analyzing FalconStor Software (OTCMKTS:FALC) and Salesforce (NYSE:CRM)

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) and FalconStor Software (OTCMKTS:FALC) are both computer and technology companies, but which is the better business? We will contrast the two companies based on the strength of their institutional ownership, profitability, valuation, analyst recommendations, dividends, earnings and risk.

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of recent ratings and recommmendations for Salesforce and FalconStor Software, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Salesforce	0	8	26	3	2.86
FalconStor Software	0	0	0	0	N/A

Salesforce presently has a consensus price target of $304.41, suggesting a potential upside of 23.87%. Given Salesforce’s higher possible upside, equities analysts clearly believe Salesforce is more favorable than FalconStor Software.

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Salesforce and FalconStor Software’s gross revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Salesforce	$36.47 billion	6.53	$4.14 billion	$5.56	44.20
FalconStor Software	$11.60 million	0.92	$980,000.00	($0.06)	-25.00

Salesforce has higher revenue and earnings than FalconStor Software. FalconStor Software is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Salesforce, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Institutional and Insider Ownership

80.4% of Salesforce shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 9.5% of FalconStor Software shares are held by institutional investors. 3.2% of Salesforce shares are held by company insiders. Comparatively, 52.8% of FalconStor Software shares are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that hedge funds, endowments and large money managers believe a company is poised for long-term growth.

Profitability

This table compares Salesforce and FalconStor Software’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Salesforce	15.44%	12.01%	7.45%
FalconStor Software	14.90%	-9.90%	15.87%

Volatility & Risk

Salesforce has a beta of 1.29, suggesting that its share price is 29% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, FalconStor Software has a beta of 2.17, suggesting that its share price is 117% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Summary

Salesforce beats FalconStor Software on 11 of the 14 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Salesforce

Salesforce, Inc. provides Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology that brings companies and customers together worldwide. The company's service includes sales to store data, monitor leads and progress, forecast opportunities, gain insights through analytics and artificial intelligence, and deliver quotes, contracts, and invoices; and service that enables companies to deliver trusted and highly personalized customer support at scale. In addition, its platform offering comprise a flexible platform that enables companies of various sizes, locations, and industries to build business workflow and apps with customer; online learning platform that allows anyone to learn in-demand Salesforce skills; and Slack, an intelligent productivity platform. The company's marketing services enables companies to plan, personalize, automate, and optimize customer marketing journey, connecting interaction, and connected products; and commerce services, which empowers shopping experience across various customer touchpoint, such as mobile, web, social, and stores and provides click-to-code tools that offers customers to build and deploy solutions. Further, its analytics offering includes Tableau, an end-to-end analytics solution for range of enterprise use cases and intelligent analytics with AI models, spot trends, predict outcomes, creates summaries, timely recommendations, and take action from any device; and integration service including MuleSoft, which provides building blocks to deliver end-to-end and connected experiences. Additionally, the company provides data cloud, a hyperscale data engine native to Salesforce; vertical services to meet the needs of customers in industries, such as financial services, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing and automotive and government; and offers salesforce starter for small and medium-sized businesses. Salesforce, Inc. was incorporated in 1999 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

About FalconStor Software

FalconStor Software, Inc., a storage software company, enables enterprise customers and managed service providers to secure, migrate, and protect their data worldwide. It offers FalconStor Virtual Tape Library, a software that emulates and replaces cumbersome physical tape libraries for archive related data preservation without being replacing their enterprise backup and archive software and associated processes; FalconStor StorSafe, a long-term archive data management software; FalconStor Continuous Data Protector delivers instant data availability, and reliable recovery; and FalconStor Network Storage Server for data storage virtualization and business continuity in heterogeneous environments. The company also provides FalconStor StorSigh, a long-term archive and business continuity driven data replication from one centralized management point; FalconStor RecoverTrac Disaster Recovery Technology that streamlines the implementation, testing, and execution of disaster recovery operations; and FalconStor MicroScanTM Technology, which minimizes the amount of data transferred during replication by eliminating inefficiencies at the application and file system layer. It sells its products through authorized partners, value-added resellers, solution providers, system integrators, direct market resellers, distributors, managed service providers, cloud service providers, and original equipment manufacturers, as well as directly to customers. The company was incorporated in 1994 and is headquartered in Austin, Texas.