CRM
Salesforce, Inc.
stock NYSE

The contagion to the broader software industry is unwarranted. The logic falls apart for Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, etc. Their buyers are line-of-business leaders (sales, service, HR, marketing) spending out of opex software budgets - not infrastructure teams making capex tradeoffs between servers and CRM licenses. Different buyer, different budget pool and approval chain. There’s no real mechanism for a memory shortage to crowd out a Salesforce renewal like it would for IBM selling legacy on-prem mainframes

Look at a 6 month chart. It's steadily crashing and hasn't leveled off yet and it's already crashed through the previous floor of around 135. 
Adobe has a PE of 11-12 without the massive debt and steady growth as well. Oracle is sitting at 20 PE with massive debt to finance this AI push. Same with CRM, strong fundamentals still getting punished. These prices are being driven by AI fears more than their fundamentals, why do you think Oracle will be different?
Maybe it will be, but I don't see why it's different. 

IBM had its worst single-day drop ever on Tuesday — down \~25.2%, from $290.23 to $217.07. A bigger one-day percentage loss than Black Monday 1987. About $69B of market cap gone in a session (WSJ). What's unusual is why, and I think the mechanism is more interesting to argue about than the number.
What they actually did. IBM pushed out preliminary Q2 numbers \~8 days early, with a CEO letter filed as an 8-K. Preliminary revenue $17.2B vs \~$17.86B expected; non-GAAP EPS $2.93 vs $3.01. Companies don't usually pre-announce a miss unless they'd rather control the narrative now than let it drop cold on the print date.
The mechanism , and I'll flag up front this is substantially IBM's own framing. In late June, memory/server prices were about to jump, so IBM's enterprise customers , big companies with roughly fixed IT budgets , rushed to buy that hardware first to lock in supply. Because the budget is fixed, that money came out of the "optional" half... which is exactly what IBM sells: z17 mainframe refreshes and the high-margin Transaction Processing software on top. Big, deferrable purchases. So the story is IBM didn't lose to a competitor; it got crowded out of its own customers' budgets by a different line item.
The segment split is consistent with that (though it doesn't prove causation, some of the -7% could be competitive/secular):
\- Infrastructure -7% (the mainframe/TPS hit)
\- Software +5%, Consulting \~flat, Red Hat +11% sequential
\- IBM's own distributed server/storage line +37% — it caught a sliver of the very wave that drowned its mainframe
\- Total sales still grew \~1%
The CEO didn't spin it. Krishna, verbatim in the 8-K: "this quarter we faltered. We did not adapt and move quickly enough, and numerous large deals failed to close on the timelines we expected." He also said IBM "did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization."
It wasn't just IBM: MSFT \~-3%, CRM \~-4%, IGV -2% on the same read-through. Cybersecurity went the other way (PANW rallied) — Krishna flagged cyber pulling client attention/spend.
Honest valuation. The easy number is misleading. Trailing GAAP EPS \~$11.31 looks like \~19x at $217, but it's flattered by a one-time \~$1.4B tax benefit in Q4'25, so I wouldn't anchor on that P/E. Cleaner lens is cash: \~$11.6B annual FCF, so at $217 you pay roughly $18 per $1 of annual free cash flow. Balance sheet is fine (Altman Z \~3.0, \~3% dividend). And the \~$315 sell-side targets floating around all predate the crash — stale, not "implied upside." The tape, though, is broken: death cross, \~21% below the 200-day, near the 52-week low, RSI \~33.
The fork. Full Q2 lands July 22, 8 days out, and it reduces to one binary: were those large deals delayed or dead? Delayed = timing air pocket, fixed budgets normalize, deferred deals close in H2, and -25% on a \~4% revenue miss is an overreaction. Dead = enterprise budgets structurally bending toward AI hardware and away from mainframe cycles, in which case the multiple should compress and this is the first leg down. The 8-K wording leans "delayed" — but that's what you'd say either way.
So, genuinely asking: do you read the June front-running as a one-quarter timing air pocket that reverses once budgets reset — making July 22 a buyable catalyst — or as the first crack in enterprises permanently reprioritizing away from mainframes, which means you wait past the 22nd before touching it?
(No position — this is on my watchlist, not a recommendation.)

It is a good buy, but I don't think we have seen the bottom of this yet. I think it'll get down to 100, PE around 15. CRM and Adobe are seeing sub 15 PE despite continuous gains in revenue. sorry for you guys bag holding, it's going to get worse because of AI fears. 
Sell now or sell to me later at 100

I want to gamble that another IBM happens this week, which software name I can buy OTM puts for $1 and sell at 1000?
I was thinking 150p on CRM, any other idea?

Fair pushback. If NOW and CRM are just easy cost cutting targets regardless of hardware spend, you'd expect them bleeding share of wallet in normal years too, not just showing up as a footnote on an IBM day. Their own guidance language next earnings will probably tell you more than IBM's print did. If they specifically flag budget getting redirected to infra, that confirms the capex story. If they just talk about deal cycles lengthening or competitive pressure, that's closer to your read.

The dispersion today is the tell. IBM –24%, NOW –4%, CRM –1.5%. If this were a software demand story the pure-play SaaS names would be carrying more of the damage. What you're seeing in the IBM print looks more like a company-specific confidence problem layered on top of the capex reallocation — clients who already had doubts about IBM's roadmap used the budget shift as cover to pause renewals. Crowding out is real, but it's hitting IBM harder than it's hitting the rest of the stack.

I just sat through an IBM pitch of there AI SaaS offering IBM Orchestrate.
They were trying to sell us like crazy. They had about 15 people on the sales call. Every "demo" was a 30s video of something happening. They essentially are trying to sell "plug and play" agent orchestration. I asked a few questions.
"What is the cost breakdown of the features?"
"Is there performance monitoring between agent coordination? What is the latency that this process adds to agent orchestration?"
"Is there built in governance options, PII redaction, PHI, input sanitization etc".
"Why didn't you use a live demo? Can we see the functionality?"
Every answer was: "We are working on it?" or "Let's touch base later" followed by more run arounds.
The company I work for was still going to try and go with them to some extent (which is insane) but the offering was garbage. It looked like it was straight out of the 70s and had nearly zero functionality and the cost was abhorrent. IBM's model of entrapping enterprise customers and selling consulting services seems to be taking a hit.
Useful software that deliver value are still being adopted from our enterprise including CRM, NOW, MSFT as well as others.

the tape already argues against the crowding out read. if enterprise dollars were structurally rotating out of software, the pure play names would be down with IBM. they're not: IBM –24%, ServiceNow –4%, Salesforce/Accetnure/Cognizant barely -1.5%. that dispersion is the market saying IBM problem not software demand problem.
Krishna's letter says it himself- they faltered and numerous large deals didnot close. slipped deals come back next quarter. crowded out demand doesnot. different stories, different tapes.
FWIW I went through recent Form 4s on IBM/CRM/NOW looking for a tell nothing, just routine RSU vesting and tax withholding, zero open-market trades. today won't show in filings for \~2 days, so the thing to watch: does anyone inside IBM buy this gap. a real open-market buy would say one-time stumble louder than any hot take here

SOFI and CRM look like decent dips to me, everything else here is trash.

I assume the only ppl that purchase ORCL IBM and CRM are boomers. Like no one in their 20-30s buying that trash.
But muh *DEEPBLUE*. Okay grandpa.

how has AI been replacing CRM?

Are $NOW and $CRM the best saas plays?

Market has already priced in catastrophe for some of these tickers based on a narrative that has yet to occur, may never occur, and as of yet finds no support in the actual numbers, e.g., MSFT, ADBE, CRM, etc.

CRM -6% 🥹

Seriously? All SaaS just fucked again? God damn NOW, CRM and MSFT

20% on guidance change. Oof. NOW down 7% and CRM down 5% too. Caught a lucky break on that one. Managed to get out of CRM yesterday.

Blurry must hate money. CRM, ADBE, MSFT taking a dump again. Bought BABA high and sold it all off at the lowest before recovery.

Adobe können wir drüber reden, aber CRM nicht. Da gehört ja viel mehr dazu: Die Persistenz, Prozesse die abgebildet werden müssen, dass ich dann am Ende des Tages vlt die Mail an den Kunden nicht mehr selbst tippe greift ja nicht die Daseinsberechtigung von CRM an.

Geht ja nicht um alle Buden und jeden Anwendungsfall. Aber Paradebeispiel ist für mich Adobe. Die hatten wie viele andere SaaS ein enormes Multiple. Und jetzt stellt man halt fest das dies nicht mehr gerechtfertigt ist. Gleiches Risiko bei $CRM
Leads qualifizieren, Mails schreiben, Report erstellen und Ticker bearbeiten. Wenn ich da anstatt 10 tools nur mehr einen KI Agenten nutze habe ich weniger Lizenzbedarf.