A 26% lift in Q2 sales led Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff to raise the technology firm’s 2017 sales projection to $10.4 billion as it continues to ride the spread of cloud-based technology.

A Q2 sales spike put the CRM software vendor on course to become the first cloud-based enterprise technology company to top the $10 billion sales milestone, says CEO Marc Benioff.

The customer relationship management software company reported record sales growth of 26% for the quarter, CEO Marc Benioff said on the company’s quarterly earnings call. “We had our best quarter ever and we reached a huge milestone for the company,” he told investors yesterday, according to a transcript of the call from Seeking Alpha.

Benioff cited his 2015 goal of reaching $10 billion in sales, at a time when annual revenue was half that figure. “In the second quarter we broke through the $10 billion run rate, doubling the company in such a short time,” he said, prompting an increase in “full-year top-line revenue guidance by $100 million to $10.4 billion.”

Contributing to the sales projection is more than $15 billion Salesforce has in booked business on and off the balance sheet, up 29% from a year ago, Benioff said.

Customers added in Q2 include Amazon.com Inc., Samsung, 21st Century Fox and Jefferies Investment Bank, Salesforce president and chief operating officer Keith Block said on the earnings call.

Salesforce, which was founded in 1999 as a provider of internet-hosted CRM software, has since expanded to offer several cloud-based applications for such purposes as marketing, web analytics and e-commerce. Its Commerce Cloud product, based on the Demandware e-commerce platform it acquired in 2016, is designed primarily for retail e-commerce. For B2B e-commerce, the Salesforce technology platform integrates with e-commerce and configure-price-quote software from such vendors as CloudCraze, Apttus and CallidusCloud.

For the second quarter ended July 31, Salesforce reported:

  • Subscription fees and support revenue of $2.368 billion, up 25.6% from $1.886 billion in the same quarter last year.
  • Professional services revenue of $193.1 million, up by 28.3% from $150.5 million.
  • Total sales of $2.56 billion, up 25.5% from $2.04 billion.
  • Gross profit of $1.89 billion, up 25.2% from $1.51 billion.
  • Net income of $17.7 million, compared with net income of $229.6 million in Q2 2016.

For the first six months of fiscal 2017 Salesforce reported:

  • Subscription fees and support revenue of $4.35 billion, up 18.9% from $3.66 billion in the same period last year.
  • Professional services revenue of $379.8 million, up by 30.2% from $291.6 million.
  • Total sales of $4.95 billion, up 25.3% from $3.95 billion.
  • Gross profit of $3.63 billion, up 23.9% from $2.93 billion.
  • Net income of $8.5 million, compared with net income of $268.4 million in the first half of fiscal 2016.

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