Salesforce.com shares leap up after IPO

Shares in hosted customer relationship vendor (CRM) Salesforce.com jumped more than 50 per cent following its initial public offering (IPO) yesterday.

Trading in the company's shares, which had an IPO price of $11 per share, opened at $15. The price reached a high of $17.30 and closed down 10 cents at $17.20.

This 56 per cent jump gave Salesforce.com a market value of $1.7bn, outstripping the last successful first-day IPO performance by a technology firm - hosted educational software vendor Blackboard, which saw its shares gain 44 per cent after starting at $14 each.

Analysts said this initial success bodes well for hosted application service provision as a delivery model that is gaining credibility.

Tom Pringle, associate analyst in Datamonitor's European CRM practice, said: "Salesforce.com is certainly the first company to come to market with this kind of solution and they have been very successful at getting their name known."

"It's come along with a completely outsourced package that offers standardisation of functionality, flexibility and speed of deployment. The delivery model is an important differentiator."

Trading under the much-coveted stock symbol CRM, Salesforce.com's initial success may also bode well for other technology IPOs, said Pringle. "Clearly there is some appetite for technology IPOs," he added.