Salesforce.com Sees Rise In 2Q Revenue; CRM provider announced a year-over-year revenue rise of 20% for 2nd fiscal quarter

How competitive's the market for on-demand CRM? Salesforcecom CEO Marc Benioff puts it this way: "We see our competitors do just about anything to try to win a deal from us." While many software cos struggle to achieve growth at all, Salesforce.com announced Thursday a year-over-year revenue increase of 20% for its second fiscal quarter ended July 31, to $316.1M, as its net income rose 112% to $21.2M. To begin his Intel Core i7 quad-core PC build project, Alex unboxes Thermaltake BigWater 760 is liquid cooler. Still, he made it clear Oracle & Microsoft are working hard to win business over Salesforce.com with its own subscription-based software services in the CRM area. Though SAP also offers CRM on demand, Salesforce.com hasn't seen it in many competitive bids. CRM is low-hanging fruit for traditional software vendors trying to beef up a presence in cloud computing. That's because if a customer decides to try out a hosted software service, it is typically considered the safest bet & requires the least integration with on-premise software systems. He pointed to several instances where it has won deals in competitive bids with Microsoft & Oracle. Insurance company Marsh chose Salesforce.com over those two for sales & marketing automation in the past, & is integrating Its CRM with news feeds & account contact info. The deal calls for 2,500 subscribers initially, but Marsh plans to grow its subscriber base to more than 10,000 people. Other wins against Oracle in the 2nd-Q include Comcast, Thompson, NCR, Abbot, AT&T, Waste Management, Capital One Services, BBVA, Bancomar, the Frank Russell Co, & Developers Diversified Real Estate, he said, adding another SaaS company, SuccessFactors, signed on for Salesforce.com after an Oracle On Demand deployment failed. Analysts said biggest threat to Salesforce.com is pricing of its CRM services, which typically run higher than Microsoft or Oracle. He indicated those consistently try to out-price it on deals but customers come back. Still, he realizes for Salesforce.com to continue on its rapid growth rate, it needs to keep moving beyond the CRM area. Salesforce.com is making some progress. Its Service Cloud, which includes services for call centers & self-service Web portals, & its Custom Cloud, for developing & running custom apps, represented over 25% of new business wins, he said. He didn't provide details on how much they are contributing to revenues. Not all those Custom Cloud apps fall into the general CRM area. For example Crescent Health Care developed 7 custom apps that run on Salesforce systems (called Force.com cloud computing platform) to monitor patient care, including intake & pharmacy needs. Rasmussen College in Chicago built a student enrollment app that runs on Force.com