Salesforce.com Forecasts Revenue Of $1B

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Salesforce.com has two major milestones in its crosshairs: the 1 million subscribers mark and the $1 billion in annual revenue threshold. While the company did not disclose its subscriber count in Thursday's financial release and subsequent conference call with analysts, it announced at September's Dreamforce user conference that it had crossed the 900,000 mark.

Analysts expect Salesforce.com to announce its 1 millionth subscriber before the end of the year, from a customer base of more than 38,000 organizations.

Salesforce.com said yesterday that its sales growth has it on pace to book $1 billion in revenue in its 2009 fiscal year, which begins in February 2008. (Salesforce's current fiscal year, 2008, ends Jan. 31.) That would put it in an elite and shrinking niche: Midsize companies with revenue around the $1 billion mark have proved attractive buyout bait to acquisitive vendors like Oracle, IBM and SAP, leaving few independent vendors of that size left in the market.

Salesforce.com didn't break out a metric many analysts and followers are curious about: the percentage of its sales coming from its lower-priced Platform Edition, an offering launched in April to serve customers that want to take advantage of Salesforce.com's hosted-applications infrastructure but not its eponymous CRM software.

If the Platform Edition is behind Saleforce.com's recent rapid growth in subscribers, it's not yet showing any signs of eroding the company's sales. Salesforce.com's revenue for the first nine months of its fiscal year was $531.8 million, a 51 percent increase over last year. Salesforce.com forecast revenue of at least $206 million for its fourth quarter, bringing its total for the year to more than $737 million.