Salesforce shares soaring on cloud computing craze

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – A hot high-tech concept known as “cloud computing” is lifting Salesforce.com Inc.’s stock to lofty heights.

The shares rocketed more than 18 percent Friday after Salesforce issued a strong third-quarter earnings report and an optimistic management forecast that persuaded several analysts that the stock is bound to climb even higher. As it is, Salesforce in nearly 6 1/2 year as a public company is proving to be more fruitful than high-tech darling Google Inc.

The fervor surrounding Salesforce has been swelling during the past year because the company appears to be sitting in a sweet spot as more businesses and government agencies change the way they buy and use software.

After years of paying huge upfront fees to install and maintain applications on individual computers in their offices, more companies are embracing the idea of subscribing to software that can be accessed from any machine with an Internet connection. The trend is becoming so popular that it has been tagged with the catchphrase “cloud computing” to replace its more geeky shorthand of “SaaS, an abbreviation of “software as a service.”

The transition has enriched and vindicated Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who faced widespread ridicule when he started the company 11 years ago on the presumption that the old way of installing software made by the likes of Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and SAP was doomed. Skeptics abounded at the time, contending that businesses would never be willing to trust a vendor to run their critical programs and applications on computers far away from their own premises.

But now Salesforce is seen as being ahead of the curve, as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP all scramble to build their own online subscription services. At the end of its latest quarter, Salesforce boasted 87,200 customers, including personal computer manufacturer Dell Inc. and health insurer Kaiser Permanente.

Wall St has become so enamored with Salesforce that its stock is outshining Internet search leader Google, a much more renowned company that went public just two months after Salesforce did in 2004.

A $10,000 investment in Salesforce’s June 2004 initial public offering would now be worth $124,000 after Friday’s surge left shares with a gain of 85 percent so far this year. A $10,000 investment in Google’s August 2004 IPO would be worth about $70,000.

Even Google has latched on to some of Salesforce’s ideas as it tries to expand its own cloud computing service. Google now offers a suite of word processing, spreadsheet and calendar programs in hopes of luring people away from Microsoft’s Office bundle of applications. Salesforce and Google have also teamed up on some cloud computing projects.