Cloud-based CRM provider Salesforce will be reporting its earnings for its latest fiscal quarter soon, and followers of the company’s stock seem optimistic. A lot of that can be credited to some the big contracts Salesforce landed, an indication that the firm and the industry in which it become a key player are growing.

Shares of Salesforce surged as high as 3 percent today, AllThingsD reported, and some of the momentum behind that spike has been retained so far. The surge followed a note by Piper Jaffray analyst Mark Murphy disclosing that the company signed a $140 million  deal with a big insurance firm, as well as an equally noticeable agreement with Facebook only referred to as a “material commitment.”

Brendan Barnicle of Pacific Crest Securities also chipped in his fair share to the buzz.  His freshly released note reads as following:

“Salesforce.com had a very strong finish to its fiscal year,” he writes, adding that it “closed several very large deals with major corporate accounts, including its largest deals ever in the U.S. and Europe. In some cases, these large deals were only Sales Cloud deals, and we see further opportunity for upsell. More importantly, the strength of the corporate business refutes the bear claim that Salesforce has penetrated its opportunity.”

Branicle expects Salesforce to post earnings of 42 cents per share on sales of $625 million, an increase from his previous forecast.

Salesforce did more than just generate more revenue last year. It acquired Rypple a couple of weeks before 2012 arrived. We covered Oracle’s response to the SAP-Success Factors acquisition yesterday, and we also covered the earlier one from Salesforce: Rypple is in fact a provider of human resource management cloud-based software.