$1bn pours from cloud for Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com reported yesterday revenues of $1.08bn, a 44 per cent increase, for its fiscal 2009 ended 31 January, indicating cloud computing can produce serious money.

But it also showed it's not immune from the current economic climate. For fiscal 2010, it lowered its forecast to a range of $1.3bn to $1.33bn.

In November, the company had forecast $1.35bn to $1.36bn, and analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expect on average $1.325bn for the year.

Chief financial officer Graham Smith said on the company's conference call: "We've slightly lowered the guidance range. There's increasing uncertainty out there."

For the company's fourth quarter, Salesforce.com reported net income of $13.8m, or 11 cents per share, on revenue of $290m. That compared with $7.4m net income and $217m revenue for the year-earlier quarter, and better than the seven cents per share on $285 million in revenue analysts expected.

Salesforce.com's core service lets customers track and analyse customers activity; its online approach also features alliances with some other high-profile internet sites, including Amazon Web Services, Google Apps and Facebook. The company competes chiefly with Oracle's Siebel software for customer relationship management.

Salesforce.com has been branching out, though, offering its Force.com system to let companies build their own custom web-based applications or third-party programmers offer their own extensions to those customers. And in December, the company launched Force.com Sites to house customer's websites.

In the fourth quarter, Salesforce.com's technology overall completed more than 12 billion transactions, the company said. The total of more than 1,500 Force.com Sites received more than 15 million page views in the quarter, and there are 166 applications available in the Force.com AppExchange.

Chief executive, Marc Benioff, said in the conference call: "The numbers for the fourth quarter clearly demonstrate increasing adoption of the Force.com platform."

Original article: Salesforce.com squeezes $1B from the cloud from CNET News.com