Marc Benioff, at the 2013 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 24, 2013.Copyright by World Economic Forum
/Photo Moritz Hager
Marc Benioff’s Salesforce is the latest major corporation forced to make cutbacks due to the ongoing worldwide financial crisis announcing that it would lay off about 10% of its workforce – including many in Israel where it employs 700 people – and close some offices as a part of a restructuring plan. In addition, Israeli live and on-demand video SaaS solutions provider Kaltura is also letting people go, laying off about 11% of the company’s total workforce.
Salesforce, like many companies in 2022, saw its market cap plummet with the slides in stock markets everywhere. The company lost almost half of its value last year. Marc Benioff is the Chair, Co-CEO, and Co-Founder of Salesforce. Benioff founded Salesforce in 1999, and it is now a Fortune 150 company with 75,000 employees, guided by four core values — trust, customer success, innovation, and equality. The company has been recognized as the Most Innovative Company by Forbes, a Best Place to Work by Fortune, and the 10th Most Admired Company in the World by Fortune.
Marc Benioff explained the cutbacks in a letter to employees saying, “The environment remains challenging and our customers are taking a more measured approach to their purchasing decisions. With this in mind, we’ve made the very difficult decision to reduce our workforce by about 10%, mostly over the coming weeks.”
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“I’ve been thinking a lot about how we came to this moment,” he added. “As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that.”
Founded in 2006 by its President Michal Tsur and CEO Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura offers a video platform, video management, video publishing, video streaming, interactive video, media management, media distribution, video portals, video players, video solutions, online video, mobile video, video conferencing, video communication, online meetings, meeting solutions, webinars, town halls, lecture capture, cloud tv, OTT TV, video cloud, video platform as a service, media services, vpaas, podcasting, and video messaging services.
Kaltura explained its cutbacks saying, “The plan is focused on realigning the company’s operations to further increase efficiency and productivity, in reaction to the current macro-economic climate. The plan’s main objectives are to position the company for lower demand, spend, and available budgets across the company’s market segments, align the company’s business strategy in light of these market conditions and support the company’s growth initiatives and return path to profitability.”
Kaltura provides live and on-demand video SaaS solutions to thousands of organizations around the world, engaging hundreds of millions of viewers at home, at work, and at school. This is especially important during the Coronavirus crisis as the shutdowns have required countless people to work remotely. And with schools closed kids are learning from home.
