Salesforce Predicts It Will Surpass $2 Billion In Sales This Year

"While it took us a decade to achieve our first billion dollars, we anticipate reaching $2 billion just three years later," said CEO Marc Benioff in a statement.

Salesforce added 5,100 new customers during the fourth quarter, bringing its total customer base to 92,300.

For the fiscal fourth quarter ended Jan. 31 Salesforce reported sales of $456.9 million, up 29 percent from $354.0 million in the same period last year. But net income was $10.9 million, down 46 percent from the $20.4 million the company earned one year ago. The bottom line was reduced by approximately $42 million in stock-based compensation expenses and some $9 million in other charges.

For all of fiscal 2011 ended Jan. 31 Salesforce reported sales of $1.66 billion, up 27 percent from $1.31 billion in fiscal 2010. Net income for the year was $64.5 million, down 20 percent from $80.7 million one year earlier.

The company is forecasting sales for fiscal 2012 between $2.03 and $2.05 billion.

Salesforce has set the stage for future growth by focusing its efforts in the last six months on developing its third-party ecosystem, expanding its application development services and opening itself up to more outside developers, notes a report from Technology Business Research. It's January acquisition of Heroku, the supplier of a cloud-computing platform for developing Ruby-based applications, marks a major expansion of Salesforce's Platform-as-a-Service efforts, the report said.