Salesforce hails first-ever $1bn quarter as industry first

Vendor claims to be first enterprise cloud firm to smash the $1bn quarterly mark as it eyes up first $5bn year

Cloud firm Salesforce has hailed its third quarter results as the first of its kind –claiming to be the first enterprise cloud vendor to have smashed the $1bn (£620m) quarterly sales mark.

Just four years ago, the cloud firm posted its first $1bn revenue year, but managed to chalk up the same figure in just three months in its Q3, an achievement its chief executive Marc Benioff described as "pretty awesome".

For its current fiscal year, the firm expects to break the $4bn sales figure, but next year predicts it will smash the $5bn full-year figure – something else Benioff claims will be an industry first.

He added that his firm's achievements are a "phenomenal milestone" for the whole cloud industry as well as Salesforce, and pointed to the exploding internet-of-things trend as a driving force.

"Today, with the next-generation of technology, our customers are connecting with their customers in entirely new ways," Benioff said on a call transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

"We are now entering the third wave of computing where everything is connected and soon there is going to be 50 billion connected products on the internet of things and behind every device, every app, everything, is a customer.

"That's why customer relationship management has just never been more important than it is today."

In its Q3, gross profit soared 34 per cent annually to $807.45m.

Europe accounted for 18 per cent of its global revenue figure – after sales in the region rose 46 per cent year on year to $195m – while the Americas and Asia-Pacific regions made up 72 per cent and 10 per cent respectively.

Benioff said Europe's success was driven by renewed focus on the UK, France and Germany.

"Europe's execution over the last several years has been phenomenal and I think perhaps some of the best execution I have ever seen in my career," he said.

"We are continuing to work in that area and a lot of that is because we narrowed our focus in Europe; we realised that the key markets in Europe were the UK, France and Germany, and that we needed to double down in those markets and that we were too prevalent in smaller markets that were not material to our organisation."