Salesforce earnings beats expectations

The cloud message the Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff continues to preach seems to be paying off.

For its third quarter, Salesforce reported earnings of 32 cents, a 14 percent increase over the year-ago quarter, on sales US$429 million, a 30 percent increase over last year. Wall Street analysts had been expecting earnings of 31 cents on sales of US$409.8 million.

Looking ahead, the company said it expects fourth quarter revenue to be between US$447 million and US$449 million. For the fiscal year, the company is raising its 2011 revenue guidance to be between US$1.647 billion and US$1.649 billion. The company also initiated guidance for its fiscal year 2012, projecting US$1.97 billion to US$2 billion in revenue. In a statement, Benioff said:

After taking a decade to achieve our first billion dollar year in fiscal 2009, we believe that our strong growth this year will allow us to deliver approximately US$2 billion in revenue in fiscal 2012, making Salesforce.com the first cloud computing company to achieve that milestone," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO Salesforce.com.

Read more of "Salesforce earnings: Beats expectations, raises guidance as cloud grows" at ZDNet.