Another quarter, another better-than-expected earnings report from Salesforce.com Inc., which managed to push its stock to a record high of $81.5 in after-hours trading yesterday that is still holding strong this morning. The price boost comes as a rare surprise for shareholders, who have grown accustomed to the software-as-a-service giant consistently delivering double-digit sales growth on the back of the ever-widening adoption of cloud computing among enterprises. 

The increased demand translated into total revenues of $1.7 billion in the third quarter, an impressive 24 percent improvement over the same period last year facilitated by Salesforce.com’s aggressive engineering focus. The company rolled out a slew of new services over the last three months including a cloud-based stream processing engine for analyzing data from connected devices and stepped up external investments as well with the creation of a $100 million European startup fund. The move came on top of the regular activity of its venture capital arm, which participated in more than half a dozen financing rounds since September.

All of that spending left Salesforce.com with a net loss of $25.16 million in the third quarter or $0.04 per share, a noticable decrease from the 38.9 million management reported a year earlier. The earning per share metric, meanwhile, came out to 21 cents, slightly more than Wall Street’s average estimate of 19 cents. But what arguably resonated the most with shareholders is the company’s full-year sales forecast, which was raised for the fourth time in a row during the earnings call to a massive $6.65 billion.

According to Salesforce’s internal estimate, that puts its cloud business on track to pass the $8 billion annual revenue mark by the end of the next fiscal year. From there, chief executive Marc Benioff’s goal of turning his company into the world’s first $10 billion software-as-a-service provider is only a short hop away in Wall Street terms.

Image via Wikimedia