Saleforce (CRM) reported very impressive quarterly revenue numbers. Proving that even in this economy there is scope to wring out cost efficiency. Salesforce is winning at the expense of Oracle and SAP suits. CEO, Mark Benioff, in his characteristic style is hitting on pet themes and slamming familiar vendors (Full transcript at SeekingAlpha):

These new customer additions are key to our growth strategy not only because they result in new business today, but because of their growth potential in the future. There’s a common theme in the deals we won in the fourth quarter. Customers are taking a hard look at the maintenance payments that they’re making to enterprise software companies and replacing those stagnant legacy technology costs with predictable scalable subscriptions in constant built-in innovation of cloud computing.

Whether it’s our Salesforce CRM sales, customer services and support, or Force.com platform, customers are choosing the low cost, low risk, and fast results of cloud computing over expensive hardware, software, and data centers that burn through precious capital and yet rarely produce the promised returns. In face offs with Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP, customers moved to the cloud in record numbers in FY ’09. That’s because in days like these, when cash is king, liquidity is critical and credit is scarce, the predictable flexible cost of cloud computing is overwhelmingly the right choice.

Key metric of net New Customers is outstanding. They added 3,600 new customers which will ensure predictable revenue over next few quarters.

As you might expect, the Salesforce CRM and Force.com community is growing as well. As of the end of the fourth quarter, our global community of net paying subscribers stood at more than 1.5 million, up more than 35% from a year ago. Equally important, we added roughly 3,600 net customers during the fourth quarter to bring our total net paying customer count to more than 55,400. That’s an increase of roughly 14,000 customers for the year, more customers than we added in our first six years of business.

What is really baffling me is the list of customers and number of licenses bought by them in last quarter. Now we all know from general economy tracking is that last quarter was anything but positive. Companies across the board retrenched. In fact one of the companies mentioned by Benioff – First Data – laid off 150 of their call center staff members. So we can expect good correction in the numbers touted by Salesforce. On this point Larry Dignan at ZDNet wrote:

For now, attrition rates at Salesforce.com are less than 1 percent, but that’s likely to increase in fiscal 2010, according to the company

On other fronts, Salesforce showed equally impressive numbers. Force.com is growing like a weed -

Custom applications, that is, applications built by our customers natively on the Force.com platform crossed the 100,000 mark for the first time. Pretty incredible. There are now more than 452,000 custom objects or traditional custom database tables now serving our customers. Our servers are now running 21 million lines of Apex Code, our procedural language that runs on our multi-tenant virtual machine, up from 15 million last quarter and 10 times the level of the first quarter.

Overall very impressive quarter. Hopefully this will lift SaaS market in the short term.