Salesforce.com reports record year

Salesforce.com's yearly revenues reached $1.33bn

Enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor Salesforce.com has reported the first $1bn (£700m) year in the company's history.

Yearly revenues reached $1.33bn (£931m), a long-time goal for the company, which specialises in hosted customer relationship management (CRM) applications and the Force.com hosted service oriented architecture platform.

"This past year marks a watershed for Salesforce.com and enterprise cloud computing," said chairman and chief executive Marc Benioff.

"Not only have we extended our leadership with Salesforce CRM, but our customers have discovered how to use the power of our cloud computing model in a number of ways, to build applications and web sites, and interact with their customers and communities."

Salesforce.com also reported an upbeat fourth quarter with revenues of $289m (£202m), up 34 per cent over the same time last year. The company said that its service processed some 12 billion transactions over the quarter.

The firm claimed that the developer ranks for Force.com had grown to more than 124,000 individuals developing some 100,000 applications and 452,000 custom database tables.

The company's lucrative quarter stands in stark contrast to many others in the IT community, which have been hit hard by the economic crisis.

Benioff credited much of this to his company's SaaS business model. "At a time when capital is precious, big-ticket software purchases just don't make sense," he said.