That represents a drop in value of nearly 10 percent from the start of the year, but it has been an up-and-down-and-up-again ride. During the year, the shares have traded as high as $160 and as low as $109. In a word, it’s a volatile stock. The reason is that investors can’t seem to settle on what Salesforce is, and how to value it. The stock was killed yesterday — especially in after-hours trading, when it fell by as much as 10 percent — on disappointing quarterly results. And, frankly, management isn’t helping to clear up the picture one bit. More on that in a minute.

There was good news and bad news, but confusion appeared to reign over the minds of Salesforce investors, who couldn’t seem to get their heads around what’s going on with the company, and so assumed the picture must be bad. Because if it was good, it would clearly be unambiguously good, right? Today, they’re shaking it off: Credit Suisse lowered its price target on Salesforce from $140 to $135, but maintained a “Buy” rating. Deutsche Bank also maintained a Buy rating, and raised its target to $205, from $200. “Buy on the weakness,” argues RBC Capital Markets.

The Salesforce story is tricky. Revenue is growing, forward guidance is up; yet billings growth is slowing and cash flow from operations was down. As Brian Schwartz of ThinkEquity put it:

Salesforce reported mixed Q3 results as revenue, EPS, cash flow beat Consensus while billings growth of 29 percent missed both Consensus and our prediction for accelerating growth. The good news is that FY13 revenue guidance and Q4 billings guidance are well-above Consensus, which suggests strong business momentum, in our view, and should reverse a two-quarter slide of decelerating billings growth. However, billings grew slower than revenue for the second consecutive quarter and Q4′s guidance assumes this trend could continue for at least another quarter, with tougher comparisons ahead.

So, what is a Salesforce investor to think?

CEO Marc Benioff took to CNBC after yesterday’s results, appearing, as he often does, on Jim Cramer’s investor-tainment show “Mad Money.” Cramer — who has been known to admit on the air that, where Salesforce is concerned, he’s “drinking the Kool-Aid and likes how it tastes” — did his best to pepper Benioff with reasonable questions, which Benioff tended to dodge. Kicking into “master salesman” mode, he stuck to his well-worn argument that Salesforce is a company that has to spend money to keep growing. “We’re trying to aggregate market share and revenue, and we’re totally focused on top-line growth,” he told Cramer. “If we were a company focused only on earnings, we wouldn’t be growing as much as we are.” That, he said, would be “the wrong thing to do in our life cycle.”

Benioff also managed to lob a little grenade at his former boss, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle. Cramer mentioned the September kerfuffle, during which Benioff was pulled from giving a speech at an Oracle customer event in San Francisco. Benioff instead crowed about winning videogame concern Electronic Arts as a new Salesforce.com customer, replacing Oracle.

So, then, how should investors evaluate Salesforce’s prospects going forward, using, say, a once-reliable metric like the number of customers, Cramer asks. That’s no longer a good indication, Benioff says. After all those acquisitions that Salesforce has made in the last year — Heroku, Radian6 and Manymoon — Salesforce’s base of customers is vastly different. Instead, he says to rely on the company’s guidance.

And that guidance is pretty good. Salesforce expects to bring in $3 billion in sales next year. Impressive, for sure. But with that sales growth comes growth in operational expenses, and a lot of effort and muscle are being put behind products with uncertain prospects — like Chatter, which Benioff routinely portrays as strategically important, but which has many competitors, including Yammer and Jive Software, to name but two.

Trust the guidance, Benioff says. Okay, but that’s another way of saying “trust me.” If that makes you feel a little uncertain, you’re probably not alone. The video clip of Benioff’s 10-minute TV appearance is below:

Naturally Benioff appeared on CNBC’s “Mad Money” after the results were announced to talk about what’s powering the surge. Cramer’s an admitted fan of Salesforce, and Benioff is something of a regular on the show. In the clip below, Benioff explains the basics of Salesforce’s cloud strategy and even riffs a bit on the social enterprise. To Cramer’s audience, I think Salesforce.com just became the company that best personifies cloud computing. It’s worth a watch. And Benioff makes his case well that Salesforce is disrupting the business software world left, right and center. My only question is, how much longer can it go on like this?

“T-Mobile will not be joining due to extenuating work demands,” a CTIA representative said, in response to our query. So far, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and AT&T are still on, the representative said.

In any case, the proposed AT&T buyout of T-Mobile is likely to dominate the CTIA trade show that takes place this week in Orlando. However, it will be very interesting to see who shows up Tuesday and just what gets said in that opening keynote.

Mobilized will be on hand with live coverage of that, as well as Monday morning’s conference call where AT&T and T-Mobile are set to talk about the planned merger. That call is slated for 5 a.m. PT.

More Coverage

• AT&T Wraps Self in Flag, Says T-Mobile Deal Essential to U.S. Competitiveness
• The AT&Terminator: Rise of Ma Bell
• Sprint: AT&T’s T-Mobile Buy Would “Dramatically Alter” Market
• First Casualty of AT&T Deal: T-Mobile Drops From CTIA Panel
• What AT&T Owes T-Mobile if Deal Doesn’t Go Through
• T-Mobile USA: No, We’re Not Getting the iPhone Yet
• T-Mobile’s Memo to Staff on the AT&T Deal
• AT&T’s President on Why T-Mobile Deal Should Pass Muster and Won’t be a Customer Nightmare
• T-Mobile: We Were Totally Kidding About AT&T’s Crappy Network!
• AT&T Agrees to Acquire T-Mobile USA for $39 Billion

Naturally, his before-dinner remarks centered mostly on Service Cloud 3, the new, more socially aware version of Service Cloud, Salesforce’s platform for tracking customer support and service. And over a truly fine meal, it was a chance for a few companies mulling Salesforce deployments hear from current customers. I met a pair of executives from Verizon who listened closely to an exec from NBC Universal describe the ins and outs and the good and bad of Salesforce. Happy customers make good informal sales reps, apparently.

Benioff went on to describe how the day before he had received call on his cell phone, and the caller say “Please hold for the President of the United States.” President Obama was calling as part of his efforts to reach out to CEOs and talk about the economy. He didn’t detail what they talked about, but in jest for assembled dinner crowd, he said he told the president that if he wanted ideas to get the economy going he should “call Cramer.” As in CNBC’s Jim Cramer, the host of “Mad Money” who was at that very moment seated across the table.

Benioff had appeared on Cramer’s show earlier in the day, and the 12-minute segment is below. It started with Cramer basically repeating much of the criticism leveled at Salesforce by The Wall Street Journal’s Brett Arends in a Feb. 25 column questioning certain choices for use of Salesforces cash, including a $278 million real estate buy for a new corporate campus and hiring aggressively, and so on.

Cramer then turned to Benioff himself, speaking live from the Cloudforce event in New York, to answer. “What kind of a dot-com are you getting me into?” Cramer howls. “We have a small window of opportunity to execute against Oracle, Microsoft and SAP,” and that means now is the time to hire and to invest. And what about the observation that Benioff has been selling shares in his own company? Benioff, who owns about 10 million shares, said his interest is “aligned with the shareholders,” and that means growing revenue and taking market share away from competitors. “We’re in a market-share war,” he said.

So far, shareholders are still buying the Salesforce story, and even Cramer says he’s “drinking the Kool-Aid” and that he “likes the taste of it.” Indeed. So do many others. At this time of the year in 2009, Salesforce was trading at $33. It closed yesterday at $130.07. It’s hard to argue with that kind of performance. But how long can it last?

Unlike the “30 Rock” stab at social networking, the “South Park” guys don’t mess around with pretend names like “YouFace”–Stan, Kyle and pals are most definitely on Facebook in this one. Though for whatever reason, they do replace CNBC’s Jim Cramer of “Mad Money” with Cartman in this clip.

Cramer, you might remember, is chairman of TheStreet.com (TSCM), and among the company’s largest holders, with a 12 percent stake as of the company’s last proxy filing. After the close yesterday, TSCM got caught up on its financial filings; the online business news site had fallen behind due to some accounting issues. TheStreet, in effect, came back to the land of the living.

One thing that was clear from the filing is that the stock may have become artificially cheap, and as of yesterday’s close was trading below the level of its balance sheet cash. But faster than you can yell Boo-yah! the market has taken care of the problem.

Read the rest of this post on the original site