Things just keep getting better for Salesforce.com Inc.

The company, which sells customer relationship management software online, that kicked off the software-as-a-service revolution in 1999 issued a stronger-than-expected earning report, sending its stock up more than 6 percent in after-hours trading. Salesforce.com had been lagging the overall market for the past three months on speculation that he couldn’t continue its torrid growth, but the good times show no signs of slowing.

While its losses grew to $37 million, or five cents per share, from $25 million a year ago, adjusted profits were 24 cents, beating analysts’ average estimates of 21 cents. Revenue jumped 25 percent to $2.14 billion against consensus estimates of $2.12 billion. Salesforce.com also raised its fiscal 2017 revenue guidance to between $8.36 billion and $8.37 billion, ahead of the consensus forecast of $8.31 billion and lifted full-year earnings guidance by three cents to 97 cents.

The company also raised its fiscal 2018 revenue guidance to $10.1 billion to $10.15 billion, compared with consensus estimates of $10.07 billion. “We expect to deliver our first $10 billion year during our fiscal year 2018, which puts us well on the path to reach $20 billion faster than any other enterprise software company,” Chairman and Chief Executive Marc Benioff said in a statement. “There is no other top-10 software company delivering that number.”

Salesforce.com said it saw a surge in new bookings in the quarter, closing a record number of large transactions. Bookings were $12 billion, up 27 percent over the same period the previous year. Professional services, although a small item on the income statement, grew 39 percent. The company also reported healthy growth in deferred revenues of 28 percent.

“We continue to see marketing technology taking share of marketers’ overall budgets to better capitalize on customer relationships, automate workflows and apply related data towards improved media choices,” Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser said in a note to clients today. “Salesforce.com is a key catalyst and beneficiary of these changes within the industry.”

The company has been expanding its core platform with new services and marketing features and this summer gobbled up Demandware Inc., a publicly-traded provider of online retailing software, for about $2.8 billion. With the pool of new customers shrinking, the company is turning its focus to upselling existing customers, a strategy that probably means more acquisitions are to come. The company tried unsuccessfully to buy LinkedIn Corp. early this year, but lost out to Microsoft, and was reported to be interested in acquiring Twitter Inc.

On the quarterly earnings call, Benioff called out the performance of the non-CRM products. The company’s Commerce Cloud is now supporting 300 million shoppers per month, and it enabled the sale 10,000 pairs of Kanye West shoes in a single hour, he said. Its Service Cloud platform is processing 600 million messages a day. The Quip cloud-based word processing app that the company acquired in August is used by more than 10,000 users at Facebook alone, he said.

On a product and regional basis, Sales Cloud grew 13 percent, Service Cloud grew 26 percent, App Cloud leapt 38 percent and Marketing Cloud was up 21 percent. Sales to the EMEA and Asia/Pacific regions were up 27 percent and 29 percent, respectively, indicating stable performance across the globe.

Image courtesy of Salesforce.com