CRM company Salesforce said its revenue grew 27 percent to $3.28 billion in the second quarter of fiscal 2019.
Salesforce subscription and support revenues rose 28 percent to $3.06 billion. Professional services and other revenues grew 14 percent to $221 million.
Keith Block, co-CEO of Salesforce, said: “With this strong quarter, we’re well on our way to our next milestone of $23 billion in revenue in FY 2022.”
Salesforce has reaped the benefits of a trend of companies increasingly turning to cloud-based services, but faces competition from Microsoft’s Dynamics 365, which competes with Salesforce’s flagship Sales Cloud offering, and from Oracle.
Salesforce has been boosting its research and development expenditures, as well as marketing and sales, increasing its operating expenses 27 percent to $2.32 billion in the second quarter.
Revenue from its flagship product, Sales Cloud, rose 12.7 percent to $1 billion, a record for a quarter. Service Cloud revenue grew 27 percent to $0.9 billion. Salesforce platform sales rose 54 percent to $0.7 billion. Marketing and Commerce Cloud revenue rose 37 percent to $0.5 billion.
Salesforce has generated $2.338 billion revenue from US, $629 million EMEA and $314 million from Asia Pacific including India, China and Japan.
The company’s unearned revenue, a key metric used to measure future business for subscription-based software vendors, rose 24 percent to $5.88 billion.
San Francisco-based Salesforce accounted for about 20 percent of the customer relationship management software market in 2017, up from 18.1 percent in 2016, according to research firm IDC.
US-based Oracle is the company’s closest rival with 7.1 percent share while Germany’s SAP is next with 6.5 percent share, Reuters reported.
Microsoft’s Dynamics enterprise software is also emerging as a major competitor after nearly tripling its market share to 4 percent in 2017.
