Many people would agree that Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) is the leader in on-demand business software, delivering its programs remotely via the Internet. But the company wants to make sure it keeps its lead, and it's making big investments to improve its platform.
Salesforce.com develops customer relationship management applications, which help improve the productivity of sales organizations and marketing departments. The software has an easy-to-use interface -- kind of like eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) or Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) -- and low maintenance requirements, since it doesn't require companies to buy servers or add tech personnel.
Salesforce.com sells its subscriptions to its software services, usually payable on a quarterly basis. In the fourth quarter, Salesforce.com added 90,000 subscribers, bringing its grand total to roughly 646,000. A big part of the growth is coming from major deployments from customers such as Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) and Dell (NASDAQ:DELL). Since these large deployments make it increasingly tough to estimate overall subscriber growth, management will now announce subscriber numbers twice a year.
Growth in other areas at the company continues to be strong as well. For the fiscal fourth quarter, revenues surged 58% to $144.2 million and net income was $516,000, which rounds to breakeven on a per-share
Takeaway
Salesforce.com expects revenues of $155 million-$157 million in the first quarter, with earnings per share that ranges from a loss of $0.01 to a profit of $0.01. For the full-year, the forecast is revenues of $710 million-$720 million and EPS of $0.07 to $0.09.
In a way, Salesforce.com is similar to Google (NASDAQ:GOOG). While Google has a massive platform for consumer services, Salesforce.com is a robust platform for business applications. It has high reliability, security, scales for major customers (there were 4.3 billion transactions in the fourth quarter), and is customizable (with tools such as Apex and AppExchange).
On the conference call, Salesforce.com's CEO, Marc Benioff, said, "We are focused on growth and revenue and we are a marketshare oriented company in a new market."
True, this sounds like typical CEO bluster. But Benioff has shown time after time that he can produce growth. And with major companies moving towards on-demand, it looks like Salesforce.com still has much growth ahead.
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Fool contributor Tom Taulli does not own shares of any company mentioned in this article.
