Buoyed by sales of its growing array of cloud-based customer management software, Salesforce.com Inc. topped forecasts for its third fiscal quarter but fell just shy of analysts’ earnings forecast for the current quarter.

The outlook for fourth-quarter profits fell a penny or two short, enough for always-skittish investors to take some profits in after-hours trading.

The San Francisco-based company reported a net profit $51.4 million, or 7 cents a share, reversing a loss a year ago. Adjusted for stock compensation and other costs, Salesforce earned 39 cents a share on revenue that rose to $2.68 billion, up from $2.14 billion a year ago. Analysts surveyed by FactSet had forecast a profit of 37 cents a share on revenue of $2.65 billion.

For the current quarter ending in January, the company said it expects revenue of $2.8 billion to $2.81 billion with an adjusted profit of 32 to 33 cents a share. Analysts had expected a profit of of 34 cents a share on revenue of $2.79 billion, so the profit forecast fell short.

That’s what sent shares down, though not much at a little under 2 percent. Shares closed the regular session at $108.80, up 1.3 percent. Shares were up almost 16 percent since second-quarter earnings in late August and up 57 percent on the year, and they’ve set seven record highs in recent weeks.

“We’re on a path to exceed $20 billion faster than any enterprise software company in history,” Chief Executive Marc Benioff said in prepared comments before a 2 p.m. PST earnings conference call.

The company also announced executive shifts today. Bret Taylor, who joined last year when Salesforce acquired Quip, where he was founder and CEO, is new president and chief product officer. Alex Dayon, a nine-year veternan of Salesforce who held those titles, will now be president and chief strategy officer.

Salesforce has been a roll thanks to a rising tide of companies moving to cloud applications. In its second quarter, it surpassed a $10 billion annual revenue run rate faster than any enterprise software provider in history.

More recently, the company has been beefing up its applications with machine learning. During its recent Dreamforce conference, it announced that it’s making its existing services more customizable and thus more accessible to a wider swath of business people, not just data scientists.

Benioff said the tech world is in the cusp of a “fourth Industrial Revolution” driven by AI. On the earnings call, Taylor underscored the importance of AI to Salesforce. “We’re just at the beginning stages of intelligence’s impact on all our businesses,” he said.

Salesforce continues to face more intense competition from the likes of Oracle Corp., Adobe Systems Inc. and IBM Corp. in marketing and advertising and Google LLC, Microsoft Corp. and Facebook Inc. in AI-driven services. The need to distinguish itself in an increasingly crowded field is obvious from the fact that nearly two-thirds of its total operating expenses come from sales and marketing.

However, most analysts seem sanguine about Salesforce’s ability to hold its own. Indeed, it’s continuing to gain market share in its core customer relationship management service, according to International Data Corp. On the call, many of the analysts congratulated the company on the “great quarter.”

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

The company said it expects full-year earnings to be $1.32 to $1.33 per share on revenue between $10.43 billion and $10.44 billion.

Photo: Robert Hof