Sales were $835 million, up 32 percent over the year-ago period, and were well ahead of the $831 million that had been the consensus expectation of Wall Street analysts. Earnings per share on a non-GAAP basis were 51 cents, 11 cents above the consensus of 40 cents. On an old-school GAAP basis, like most cloud companies, Salesforce lost $20.8 million, or 14 cents a share. Salesforce shares rose by more than $6, or nearly 4 percent, in after-hours trading.

The company also finished its fiscal year with more than $3 billion in sales, a goal that CEO Marc Benioff (pictured) had set last year.

Here’s Salesforce’s original announcement:

Salesforce.com Announces Fiscal 2013 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Results
- Quarterly Revenue of $835 Million, up 32% Year-Over-Year
- Full Year Revenue of $3.05 Billion, up 35% Year-Over-Year
- Deferred Revenue of $1.86 Billion, up 35% Year-Over-Year
- Unbilled Deferred Revenue Increases to Approximately $3.5 Billion
- Full Year Operating Cash Flow of $737 Million
- Raises FY14 Revenue Guidance to $3.82 – $3.87 Billion
- Initiates FY14 Non-GAAP EPS Guidance of $1.93 – $1.97

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 28, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Salesforce.com (CRM), the enterprise cloud computing (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, today announced results for its fiscal fourth quarter and full fiscal year ended January 31, 2013.

“Salesforce.com had a spectacular finish to its fiscal year. We delivered more than $3 billion in revenue and constant currency revenue growth of 37%,” said Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Salesforce.com continues to be the fastest growing top ten enterprise software company in the world.”

Salesforce.com delivered the following results for its fiscal fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2013:

Revenue: Total Q4 revenue was $835 million, an increase of 32% on a year-over-year basis. Subscription and support revenues were $785 million, an increase of 32% on a year-over-year basis. Professional services and other revenues were $49 million, an increase of 31% on a year-over-year basis.

For the full fiscal year 2013, the company reported revenue of $3.05 billion, an increase of 35% from the prior year. Subscription and support revenues were $2.87 billion, an increase of 35% on a year-over-year basis. Professional services and other revenues were $181 million, an increase of 29% on a year-over-year basis.

Earnings per Share: Q4 GAAP net loss per share was ($0.14), and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $0.51. The company’s non-GAAP results exclude the effects of $108 million in stock-based compensation expense, $21 million in amortization of purchased intangibles, and $6 million in net non-cash interest expense related to the company’s convertible senior notes, and is based on a non-GAAP tax rate of approximately 29%. GAAP EPS calculations are based on a basic share count of approximately 145 million shares. Non-GAAP EPS calculations are based on approximately 153 million diluted shares outstanding during the quarter, including approximately five million shares associated with the company’s convertible senior notes.

For the full fiscal year 2013, GAAP net loss per share was ($1.92), and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $1.63. The company’s non-GAAP results exclude the effects of $379 million in stock-based compensation, $149 million related to the one-time tax valuation allowance established in the fiscal third quarter, $88 million in amortization of purchased intangibles, and $24 million in net non-cash interest expense related to the convertible senior notes, and is based on a non-GAAP tax rate of approximately 33%. GAAP EPS calculations are based on a basic share count of approximately 141 million shares. Non-GAAP EPS calculations are based on approximately 149 million diluted shares outstanding during the year, including approximately four million shares associated with the company’s convertible senior notes.

Cash: Cash generated from operations for the fiscal fourth quarter was $282 million, an increase of 17% on a year-over-year basis. For the full fiscal year 2013, operating cash flow totaled $737 million, up 25% year-over-year. Total cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities finished the quarter at $1.8 billion.

Deferred Revenue: Deferred revenue on the balance sheet as of January 31, 2013 was $1.86 billion, an increase of 35% on a year-over-year basis. Current deferred revenue increased by 39% year-over-year to $1.80 billion, benefited in part by longer invoice durations. Non-current deferred revenue decreased by 27% year-over-year to $64 million. Unbilled deferred revenue, representing business that is contracted but unbilled and off balance sheet, ended the fourth quarter at approximately $3.5 billion, up from approximately $2.2 billion at the end of the fiscal 2012.

As of February 28, 2013, salesforce.com is initiating revenue and EPS guidance for its first quarter of fiscal year 2014, and initiating EPS guidance for its full fiscal year 2014. In addition, the company is raising its full fiscal year 2014 revenue guidance previously provided on November 20, 2012.

Q1 FY14 Guidance: Revenue for the company’s first fiscal quarter is projected to be in the range of $882 million to $887 million, an increase of 27% to 28% year-over-year.

GAAP net loss per share is expected to be in the range of ($0.44) to ($0.42), while diluted non-GAAP EPS is expected to be in the range of $0.40 to $0.42. The non-GAAP estimate excludes the effects of stock-based compensation expense, expected to be approximately $113 million, amortization of purchased intangibles related to acquisitions, expected to be approximately $24 million, and net non-cash interest expense related to the convertible senior notes, expected to be approximately $7 million. EPS estimates assume a GAAP tax rate of approximately negative 59%, which reflects the estimated quarterly change in the tax valuation allowance, and a non-GAAP tax rate of approximately 35%. The GAAP EPS calculation assumes an average basic share count of approximately 147 million shares, and the non-GAAP EPS calculation assumes an average fully diluted share count of approximately 158 million shares.

Full Year FY14 Guidance: Revenue for the company’s full fiscal year 2014 is projected to be in the range of $3.82 billion to $3.87 billion, an increase of 25% to 27% year-over-year.

For the company’s full fiscal year 2014, GAAP net loss per share is expected to be in the range of ($1.22) to ($1.18) while diluted non-GAAP EPS is expected to be in the range of $1.93 to $1.97. The non-GAAP estimate excludes the effects of stock-based compensation expense, expected to be approximately $503 million, amortization of purchased intangibles related to acquisitions, expected to be approximately $85 million, and net non-cash interest expense related to the convertible senior notes, expected to be approximately $27 million. EPS estimates assume a GAAP tax rate of approximately negative 54%, which reflects the estimated annual change in the tax valuation allowance, and a non-GAAP tax rate of approximately 35%. Due to the tax valuation allowance, however, the GAAP tax rate could be volatile and is therefore difficult to forecast. The GAAP EPS calculation assumes an average basic share count of approximately 150 million shares, and the non-GAAP EPS calculation assumes an average fully diluted share count of approximately 161 million shares.

At fundraisers with prices in the tens of thousands of dollars, Obama and his team met for roundtable discussions with small groups of tech entrepreneurs and investors.

Barack Obama at a roundtable discussion with techies including Sean Parker, Shervin Pishevar and Tom Katis. (Photo courtesy Tom Katis.)

Rather than the usual prepared opening remarks followed by handshakes and photo ops, the events were held at large tables, with each of 20 participants given time to address the issues of their choice.

(And then of course there were official photo ops, though attendees were asked to not humblebrag too hard on social media about meeting the president.)

It wasn’t cheap. Attendees paid $35,800, the legal maximum amount for campaign donations to the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Party.

But even at that price, putting just 20 people in a room isn’t the most efficient way to raise money.

“It wasn’t about the fundraising ROI for him,” said investor Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital, who helped organize the dinners. “You’d do better if you were in a larger room high-fiving everyone.”

And Sacca argued that the fundraisers weren’t as elitist as they might have been. “Before these roundtables, President Obama had no forum to hear from tech guys who weren’t Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs or John Doerr,” he said.

The roundtables were born from a partnership between longtime campaign organizer and Tech for Obama founder Jim Green — who has been working on Democratic campaigns for the past 16 years — with participants drawn from the networks of three politically active tech guys: Sacca, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and investor Shervin Pishevar.

“I’ve always wanted to create a forum for two-way conversations, but I’ve never found a campaign as willing to go there,” said Green. “And it just so happened it was the president in office, because Barack Obama enjoys talking to smart, thoughtful people.”

Some 140 total techies participated in the roundtables, with the first held in December 2011 in Washington, D.C., and the final held in October 2012 in San Francisco (others were in Oakland, Calif., and Chicago, Ill.).

But the roundtables were not set up as a series of eight events — rather, each was successful enough that Green was able to convince the Obama team to commit to do another.

“The president really enjoyed it, so he continued the dialogue,” said Pishevar.

Courtesy Tom Katis

Participants at the Obama roundtables included 140 different individuals, among them Sean Parker, Shawn Fanning, Troy Carter, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tom Katis, Jeremy Stoppleman, Tony Robbins, Geoff Ralston, Garrett Camp, Dave Morin, Ron Conway, Reid Hoffman, Jason Putorti, Kevin Lynch and Matt Mullenweg. (Indeed, a lot of dudes.)

All told, the series raised $6 million to $7 million, according to Green. That’s out of more than $1 billion raised for the Obama campaign altogether.

The events were never publicized, but they weren’t secret, so the organizers agreed to answer my general questions. The White House did not reply to requests for comment.

The most popular issues, said those who attended, included immigration reform, education and the red tape of government technology deals — along with some mentions of climate change, patent reform and regulatory constraints.

Face time with the president wasn’t a hard sell, said Pishevar — though Republicans do in fact exist in Silicon Valley. “There are some people in the venture space, especially the older-school guys, who were Romney people,” Pishevar noted.

The organizers said other techies who wanted to be involved but didn’t feel comfortable throwing down big bucks participated in more practical sessions without the president, including a visit to campaign headquarters in Chicago to talk best practices with members of the Obama messaging and policy team. And others got even more involved as in-house technologists on the campaign’s now-famous data operation.

Roundtable participant Geoff Ralston, a partner at Y Combinator, asked Obama a question about education, and said he came away more impressed with the president than he’d expected.

Prior to the roundtable, he felt largely ignored by national politics in a state that’s solidly blue. “Who comes to California, who gives a fuck? California’s done,” Ralston said. “We’re completely disenfranchised here. Just look at the TV, there’s no ads.”

After Obama talked to a range of other topics and answered his education question, and then came up to Ralston at the end of the event and asked how he did on that specific issue, Ralston was sold. “I don’t know that he was Clintonesque, but he was on the issues. He was good.”

So, now that Obama is reelected, can techies still expect him to come courting Silicon Valley every few months? Probably not, said the organizers, though Obama’s staff may maintain the relationships.

But the participants have their photos to cherish and their virtual shout-outs to imagine — as Obama tackles issues such as immigration — and perhaps they have a newfound sense of civic responsibility.

As Benioff keynotes go, this one has been described to me as “understated.” Rather than occupy a huge venue like the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, Salesforce is holding this event at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Rather than a three-hour revival meeting, it will be a simpler one-hour address. It’s as though a big-name rock singer known for big stadium concert blowouts has shifted to the coffeehouse circuit.

Expect to hear the words “service” and “mobile” a lot. Salesforce made an announcement overnight about what it calls its Service Cloud. It has been adapted to run natively on mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad. The idea is that customer service reps or any other customer-facing employee can use a mobile device to help customers get the help they need or buy the stuff they want, regardless of how and when they present themselves.

One feature due later this year is called co-browsing. It allows customer-facing reps to engage in what Salesforce describes as a “shared Web experience,” basically browsing together. That pair of shoes you want but can’t seem to find, or that pair of slacks in your size? Sales or service reps can help you find it, and can see what you see on whatever screen you happen to be using.

A big theme of Salesforce’s assumptions and positioning will be around customer expectations. All of us are so used to having access to everything within seconds; when we’re customers we get impatient when we have to wait for someone else to track down whatever it is we need.

A couple of other new additions to the Service Cloud are aimed at addressing that. Mobile Service Cloud Communities give companies a way to build a single place where customers can get answers, either by way of self-help, other people or via company experts.

Another is an instant chat capability. The example I was given here is a clothing store. Say you’re waiting for an alteration. You check with the store, and the sales rep who takes your call is able to contact the tailor working on it directly, who tells you it will be ready in a few hours and you can pick it up on your way home from work.

What you won’t hear Benioff talking about is how the social enterprise is going to change the world. That message is so 2012, and has more or less played itself out.

But you can’t argue with the performance of Salesforce shares. They’re up by more than 34 percent since hitting a recent low in August. They closed Monday at $163.51. And the company looks on track to deliver its planned four-for-one share split. That, at least, is a message most shareholders can get behind.

1.) Salesforce CEO Benioff Invites Laid Off Yammer Employees to Work for Him

2.) Microsoft Could Make Billions From Office for iPad

3.) Apple Working on Fix for iOS 6.1 Passcode Hack

4.) American Express Cardholders Can Now Tweet to Buy

5.) HBO to Finally Let Subscribers Stream HBO Go to TV Over AirPlay

6.) A Big Year for Apple’s iPhone in India

7.) Bill Gates on Philanthropy, Steve Jobs and the Microsoft Product That Never Was

8.) Yes, Intel Is Building a Web TV Service (A Box, Too)

9.) The Cloud’s Dirty Little Secret

10.) Apple MacBook Pros With Retina Display Get Faster, Cheaper

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

There have been layoffs and changes in the reporting structure of Yammer’s marketing department, according to reports in TechCrunch and Business Insider. Neither are sitting well with remaining Yammer employees.

Cue Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, whose company had several times come under sometimes humorous, sometimes withering criticism from Yammer before the acquisition. His reaction to the reports? He invited laid-off Yammer workers to send him their resumes and maybe come work for him.

And of course he did it via Twitter.

Attention this weeks laid off Yammer employees: Salesforce is Hiring! Please send me your CV at salesforce.com”>ceo@salesforce.com. http://t.co/pmCP9U5j

February 10, 2013 1:05 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@Benioff

Marc Benioff

Salesforce shares have been on a tear of late and touched a 52-week high of $175.74 today, closing at $173.86, up more than 47 percent from where they were trading a year ago. The proposal would boost the number of shares from 405 million now to 1.6 billion. It would also push the number of shares owned by CEO Marc Benioff, the company’s largest non-institutional shareholder, to north of 40 million shares from about 10.2 million shares now.

The thinking about the split, Salesforce says in the filing, is to keep the shares affordable for mainstream investors. At $43 and change, a share of Salesforce would be easier to justify buying than it is at $173 and change. It also makes stock options given to new hires a little more attractive, because there’s a perception that there’s a lot more room to grow. Salesforce puts it like so in the filing:

“The trading price of our common stock has risen significantly over the past several years. The Board regularly evaluates the effect of the trading price of our common stock on the liquidity and marketability of our common stock and believes the considerable price appreciation has made our common stock less affordable and, therefore, attractive to fewer investors. The Board believes that this considerable price appreciation, and the associated reduction in number of shares of stock covered by equity awards we issue to newly hired and existing employees, has reduced the perceived attractiveness of our employee equity awards.”

Late last year, it landed a significant round of venture capital funding, a $25 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital. Prior investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and Floodgate all participated, too. The round nudged Okta’s total capital raised to north of $52 million.

The funding announcement was accompanied by a larger vision statement about what Okta aims to achieve. In that statement, CEO Todd McKinnon argued that “identity is central to how work gets done in a business,” meaning that Okta aims to be a lot more than the company that makes it easy to manage account credentials.

I recently had a chance to catch up with McKinnon in New York to talk about what he meant by that, and to flesh out what he sees happening at Okta in the coming year.

AllThingsD: You’ve just landed a big C round investment, but it coincided with the publication of a big vision statement. What is the vision statement all about?

McKinnon: I think people misunderstand a lot of things about our company. The first thing they think is that we’re just for cloud stuff. And CIOs and other people thinking about building the next generation of their IT environment don’t want two identity systems. They don’t want the old that barely worked, and the new one that doesn’t talk to the old one. They want one. And we’re positioned to build that. We’re trying to be more aggressive at communicating that.

Initially, everyone understood the identity layer to be a simple manner of managing all the credentials for using cloud services. Now you’re reaching into more on-premise products. How much of a pivot is that for you?

The vision has always been about a single identity layer for everything. The reality is that we started as a little cloud company; the most receptive buyers were companies doing a lot of cloud stuff. So that was how we communicated about ourselves to the marketplace. And now the product has matured to a point where we can really communicate about the vision, about a unified way of managing identity.

Give me some sense of momentum. Funding is certainly an indirect indicator, but what else is going on?

We have, in the last year, added 140 enterprise customers, which brings us to more than 200. We’ve added 300,000 end users. Those are paid enterprise-user seats, which means there’s real money behind them, and that has brought our total user footprint to 500,000.

The obvious thing that people start wondering about a company like yours is when you might be ripe for acquisition, or if you’re going to go the distance. I can think of a handful of cloud and software companies, like Salesforce.com or Oracle or IBM, that could be logical buyers. What are your thoughts about this?

We’re building the identity layer for the next generation of corporate IT. Everyone is going to want to do something like this. You saw Saleforce’s announcement that they want to do this, too. This is clearly something strategic. The value of our product comes from it being in the hands of a neutral party. Our customers want Switzerland; they don’t want someone like, say, a Salesforce.com or a Google, because it would be beholden to their own apps.

I’m reminded that David Sacks, the CEO at Yammer, used to say something similar about being Switzerland when asked about being acquired. Look what happened there: Yammer is now part of Microsoft. Couldn’t the same thing happen to you? And what would it mean if it did?

It’s different for us. If you never connected Yammer to anything, it could be valuable. If any one of our integration partners, say, Jive or Box, or any one of those companies cuts us off, the value of the product goes down. So it’s different in that regard. The Yammer platform is still valuable with no integrations. Our platform is not. So I think that’s a big difference. It gets back to the funding. We’re venture-backed. At the end of the day, I have a responsibility to my shareholders, and we have to build enough momentum in the company to have the outcome of not being acquired, to be superior in the minds of my shareholders than the outcome of being acquired. Clearly at Yammer, they couldn’t do that.

Now you jumped ahead to my next question. Salesforce’s Marc Benioff announced a plan to create a competitor to Okta, and we talked about it at the time. How far, to the extent that you’re aware, has that effort come along? Are you worried about it?

Anytime a big company announces they want to compete with you, you should be worried. They said they’re going to build a product, and that’s definitely going to be a competitive threat. The reality is that Salesforce is doing a lot of things, and they’re spread very thinly. I don’t think they’re going to make the kind of investment necessary.

What will you do with the money?

The big thing is to build out the product. Right now, it’s robust, scalable, used by tons of customers live. But there’s a lot of work to do on it. We have 2,000 connectors to different applications and services, but there’s more than 2,000 of those. We need 20,000 connectors and then we need 50,000. We need to really expand that number and connect to everything. Every device, every application, every platform. So we’re going to use the money to build the product in that way. If a customer has an application that’s built by some regional provider, with maybe 50 customers in some niche business, to a customer in a certain vertical, that application is very important. They don’t want to have some kind of one-off situation where they can sign in to everything they use, but not this one thing. And it’s not economical for us to go out and build the connector ourselves. So we need to have a platform where someone can go and build the connector themselves and share it with anyone who might need it. The thing about our platform, because it’s based in the cloud, is that it can be maintained and supported over time. There’s also some exciting things we can do with helping companies collaborate with each other. So if two companies are using Okta, they can connect their systems across firewalls more easily. That’s the identity network we’ve been talking about.

The marketing software concern for which the software giant will pay $871 million might have also made a logical fit at Salesforce.com, though Salesforce might have had to take on some debt to pay that price.

Anyway, there’s speculation that today’s deal for Eloqua may amount to a starting gun for a new round of acquisitions in the cloud software space. In a note to clients today, Karl Keirstead, an analyst with BMO Capital Markets, argues that Salesforce may answer Oracle with some acquisitions of its own.

“In our view, the deal is a modest net negative for Salesforce.com, making it incrementally tougher for them to pick off Oracle’s Siebel client base,” Keirstead wrote this morning. He also believes that about 50 percent or more of Eloqua’s customers are also Salesforce.com customers.

That might spur Salesforce into action on the acquisition front, he says. Having already made significant acquisitions of Radian6 and Buddy Media in the last two years, Salesforce might move on two privately held cloud-based companies in the marketing field.

One is Marketo, a fast-moving company that specializes in revenue performance management. It raised $50 million in a Series F round led by Battery Ventures last year, bringing its total capital raised to $108 million. Its other investors include Institutional Venture Partners, InterWest Partners, Mayfield Fund and Storm Ventures.

Another possible target for Salesforce, Keirstead argues, is HubSpot, a social media marketing outfit based in Cambridge, Mass. It raised $35 million in a fifth round of funding last month. The round brought its total capital raised to about $101 million, and Salesforce had invested in earlier rounds. Its other investors include Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst Partners, Matrix Partners, Altimeter Capital and Cross Creek Capital.

The point, Keirstead says, is that Salesforce will seek to build its own “marketing cloud” offering. Of course, Salesforce doesn’t have the financial flexibility that Oracle does. It has only $1.4 billion in combined cash and short- and long-term investments as of the close of its most recent quarter. That’s almost pocket change compared to Oracle’s $34 billion as of the quarter reported earlier this week.

“It’s Time. Demand a Plan to End Gun Violence,” reads the ad, which was signed by a plethora of major digital players.

They include, in part: Lerer Venture’s Ken Lerer (who organized the effort); SV Angel’s Ron Conway, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Skype President Tony Bates, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, adviser Bill Campbell, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, Findery’s Caterina Fake, Emerson Collective’s Laurene Jobs, Code Advisors’ Quincy Smith, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and Zuckerberg Media’s Randi Zuckerberg.

In addition, there is a large-scale social media effort under way for Demand a Plan, which signee and venture capitalist Fred Wilson likens on his blog to other Internet-wide campaigns.

“Like the PIPA/SOPA efforts last year, this effort is diverse, distributed, chaotic, and hopefully effective and powerful,” he wrote.

Here’s the ad itself:

Marc Benioff, who is famous for declaring that “Software Is Dead,” may face a similar fate with his recent bets on Buddy Media and Radian6. These applications provide data to people who must then analyze, prioritize and act — often at a pace much slower than the digital world. Data, content and platform insights are too massive for mere mortals to handle without costing a fortune. Solutions that leverage big data are poised to win — freeing up people to do the strategy and content creation that is best done by humans, not machines.

Big data is too big for humans to work with, at least in the all-important analytical construct of responding to opportunities in real time — formulating efficient and timely responses to opportunities generated from your marketing cloud, or pursuing the never-ending quest for perfecting search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). The volume, velocity and veracity of raw, unstructured data is overwhelming. Big data pioneers such as Facebook and eBay have moved to massive Hadoop clusters to process their petabytes of information.

In recent years, we’ve gone from analyzing megabytes of data to working with gigabytes, and then terabytes, and then petabytes and exabytes, and beyond. Two years ago, James Rogers, writing in The Street, wrote: “It’s estimated that 1 Petabyte is equal to 20 million four-door filing cabinets full of text.” We’ve become jaded to seeing such figures. But 20 million filing cabinets? If those filing cabinets were a standard 15 inches wide, you could line them up, side by side, all the way from Seattle to New York — and back again. One would need a lot of coffee to peruse so much information, one cabinet at a time. And, a lot of marketing staff.

Of course, we have computers that do the perusing for us, but as big data gets bigger, and as analysts, marketers and others seek to do more with the massive intelligence that can be pulled from big data, we risk running into a human bottleneck. Just how much can one person — or a cubicle farm of persons — accomplish in a timely manner from the dashboard of their marketing cloud? While marketing clouds do a fine job of gathering data, it still comes down to expecting analysts and marketers to interpret and act on it — often with data that has gone out of date by the time they work with it.

Hence, big data solutions leveraging machine learning, language models and prediction, in the form of self-learning solutions that go from using algorithms for harvesting information from big data, to using algorithms to initiate actions based on the data.

Yes, this may sound a bit frightful: Removing the human from the loop. Marketers indeed need to automate some decision-making. But the human touch will still be there, doing what only people can do — creating great content that evokes emotions from consumers — and then monitoring and fine-tuning the overall performance of a system designed to take actions on the basis of big data.

This isn’t a radical idea. Programmed trading algorithms already drive significant activity across stock markets. And, of course, Amazon, eBay and Facebook have become generators of — and consummate users of — big data. Others are jumping on the bandwagon as well. RocketFuel uses big data about consumers, sites, ads and prior ad performance to optimize display advertising. Turn.com uses big data from consumer Web behavior, on-site behaviors and publisher content to create, optimize and buy advertising across the Web for display advertisers.

The big data revolution is just beginning as it moves beyond analytics. If we were building CRM again, we wouldn’t just track sales-force productivity; we’d recommend how you’re doing versus your competitors based on data across the industry. If we were building marketing automation software, we wouldn’t just capture and nurture leads generated by our clients, we’d find and attract more leads for them from across the Web. If we were building a financial application, it wouldn’t just track the financials of your company, it would compare them to public filings in your category so you could benchmark yourself and act on best practices.

Benioff is correct that there’s an undeniable trend that most marketing budgets today are betting more on social and mobile. The ability to manage social, mobile and Web analysis for better marketing has quickly become a real focus — and a big data marketing cloud is needed to do it. However, the real value and ROI comes from the ability to turn big data analysis into action, automatically. There’s clearly big value in big data, but it’s not cost-effective for any company to interpret and act on it before the trend changes or is over. Some reports find that 70 percent of marketers are concerned with making sense of the data and more than 91 percent are concerned with extracting marketing ROI from it. Incorporating big data technologies that create action means that your organization’s marketing can get smarter even while you sleep.

Raj De Datta founded BloomReach with 10 years of enterprise and entrepreneurial experience behind him. Most recently, he was an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Mohr-Davidow Ventures. Previously, he was a Director of Product Marketing at Cisco. Raj also worked in technology investment banking at Lazard Freres. He holds a BSE in Electrical Engineering from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

As is usually the case with these things, it’s not about the base salary, but the stock options. Salesforce’s board gave Benioff a grant to buy 375,000 Salesforce shares at a price of $156.37 a share, which was Salesforce’s closing price on the grant date of Nov. 27. The shares vest over four years.

The option is granted on the assumption that the share price will rise, which it has been doing. Salesforce shares are up more than 55 percent this year. In 2011, Benioff’s last options grant was for 350,000 shares at a price of $108.25. That grant has since increased in value by more than $17 million.

Of course, that’s in addition to the 10 million shares Benioff already owns beneficially as of Nov. 27, according to the filing, worth nearly $1.6 billion.

The filing also says that Benioff is planning to sell off 412,500 shares in a three-day spree beginning on Dec. 26. No one knows what Salesforce’s share price will be that day, but at today’s price those sales would bring in more than $65 million.

The filing also discloses raises for several other Salesforce execs. CFO Graham Smith saw his base pay increase to $600,000 per year from $480,000, and executive VP of technology Parker Harris’s base pay is going to $625,000 from $450,000. They also received share grants: Harris got options to buy 60,200 shares plus 5,300 shares of restricted stock. Smith got options to buy 52,700 shares and 4,600 shares of restricted stock.

According to new filings submitted by Salesforce to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Buddy Media, the cloud-based social media marketing company, finished 2011 with $24.7 million in sales, and ran a net loss of $14.7 million. For the first six months of 2012, it clocked $18 million in sales, with a loss of $20.6 million. That puts it on a run rate to somewhere in the neighborhood of $36 million to $40 million.

That’s pretty much in line with the guidance that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff gave on a conference call the day the deal was announced. That works out to a multiple of a little less than 19 times revenue.

It’s worth paying attention to because Salesforce has a recent history of paying high prices on its acquisitions. Examples include Heroku, for which it paid $212 million, and for which Salesforce took a lot of criticism for arguably overpaying; and Radian6, for which it paid $326 million for a cash-flow-positive company.

At the time of the acquisition, Buddy had $37 million in cash on the balance sheet. That figure was down by about $21 million from the end of 2011, when it had north of $58 million in cash. That works out to a burn rate of $3.5 million per month, or $42.5 million for the year.

But the deal — which is Salesforce’s largest yet, and for which it is said to have out-maneuvered Web giant Google — as with every acquisition, is about the future. Benioff said during Salesforce’s last earnings call that Buddy Media handles about 10 percent of the advertising that appears on Facebook, and obviously the aim is to increase that.

His big hope for Buddy Media, as he described it on a conference call, is to combine its capabilities with that of Radian6 and create what he calls a “marketing cloud” that would bring in about $1 billion in annual revenue. It seems, at first, a little nebulous, until you consider the relative sizes of the two main component of the “marketing cloud” business.

Remember that Radian6 was, at the time of its acquisition last year, doing about $50 million annually. Assuming that it has grown since then, when combined with Buddy’s run rate, the “marketing cloud” is already a $100 million business. Obviously, there’s a way to go, but given Salesforce’s steadily growing free cash flow to fund operations, you can see a reasonable path to getting there.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

In the TV interview (see it below), Ellison made news, saying that Oracle will not be doing any large acquisitions, especially NetApp, the storage concern that has been occasionally mentioned as a possible target. Ellison said there would be no large acquisitions.

“We think we have all the assets in-house to grow very rapidly on an organic basis,” he said.

Baritoromo had clearly been reading AllThingsD because she made a point to call out Ellison’s 45 percent share of NetSuite. In a subtle dig at Salesforce.com and its CEO Marc Benioff, Ellison has been calling Oracle “the first cloud computing company.”

Then it was on to his keynote — his second of the conference — where he revisited in additional detail some of the points he made in his first keynote from Sunday, but also did some demos.

For one thing, Ellison reminded the audience that while Oracle may not yet be the biggest software-as-a-service company by revenue, it does offer more applications on a SAAS basis than anyone else — which, given Oracle’s just-completed rewrite of its entire suite of applications for the cloud, is a factual claim.

But he also made some important pronouncements around his view of how the cloud runs, again making subtle digs at the competition. “When you run in the cloud, you also pick the infrastructure that it runs on,” he said. That’s a dig at Salesforce and other smaller SAAS companies that seek to compete in some manner or another with Oracle. Sign on for the application, you’re stuck with the platform and other infrastructure that the company selling it has running in their data center.

It was an easy segue from there to Oracle’s public and private cloud offerings. Ellison said Oracle has about 400 customers using its new Fusion applications. He said about two thirds of those customers were running their applications in Oracle’s public cloud, while about one third were doings so on dedicated machines on premise.

But since both the public and private cloud are essentially equivalent — after all, they run on the same hardware and the same software — it’s easy for a company to change its mind. “They can move to an Oracle private cloud or public cloud without changing anything,” he said. “It’s very easy to move applications back and forth.” He thinks many of those customers will do just that and switch over to the public cloud within a year. “We’ll have more visibility into that by this time next year,” he said.

Part one of Ellison’s CNBC interview is below. The other parts, where he talks about increasing Oracle’s dividend, explains why the hardware business shrank, why he bought all those houses, calls his late friend Steve Jobs irreplaceable, and then kidded Baritoromo about buying the LA Lakers are also all online.

While talk of the cloud has been dominating every aspect of Oracle OpenWorld, the massive tech conference that runs through Wednesday Thursday in San Francisco, NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson has been delivering key applications to help executives run their businesses, large and small, from the cloud.

Salesforce and NetSuite were effectively founded as a result of a single 1998 conversation involving Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Evan Goldberg, NetSuite’s current CTO. After another company Goldberg had started crashed and burned, Ellison asked him what he wanted to do next. His answer, as Nelson told me by phone yesterday, was a software company like Siebel Systems, but one that delivered a customer relationship application via the Internet’s pipes, without having to be installed on a local machine.

Ellison said it was a fine idea, but that there was a greater need for a company that delivered software in the same way but was used to manage the business. Goldberg took that idea and created what was initially called NetLedger, and is now NetSuite. Benioff called Ellison back two weeks later and said he was going to start the Siebel-like company that Goldberg had initially envisioned.

While Ellison invested in them both, it is NetSuite that is known affectionately as “Larry’s other company.” Now NetSuite is on track to report sales north of $300 million for the year. It next reports earnings on Nov. 2 and is currently in a quiet period, so Nelson couldn’t talk about the state of business right now.

Even so, later today, Nelson will take the stage for a keynote at Oracle OpenWorld. He’ll have some news to make: NetSuite today announced a new two-tier version of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that connects to Oracle’s E-Business Suite.

While NetSuite has traditionally been the kind of cloud company where software is accessible to smaller and mid-sized companies, with tens of thousands of customers and an average deal size of $50,000, Nelson says it is starting to move upmarket, penetrating ever larger companies and subsidiaries of major multinational companies.

Nelson explained it like this: When those large multinational companies run ERP software, they tend to standardize on Oracle or its primary competitor SAP. “These are systems that are architected for $2 billion corporations, but not for the next tier down, the $200 million subsidiary,” Nelson said. Those smaller units would run a mixture of ERP systems geared to the midmarket companies like Sage in the U.K., Great Plains in the U.K. and MYOB in Australia. “It was like a Tower of Babel,” Nelson says.

Examples of companies already taking this two-tier approach include Pitney Bowes, which runs SAP at the corporate level but NetSuite in certain divisions. Procter & Gamble uses NetSuite to run several divisions in Asia; at the corporate level, it’s an SAP shop. “That’s the existing two-tier environment today,” Nelson said.

Now those subsidiaries are turning to NetSuite OneWorld, using it to connect with the parent’s Oracle system. Today, NetSuite announced a new version that’s geared toward this “two-tier” approach.

With new versions of NetSuite OneWorld and new SuiteCloud Connectors for Oracle, customers should be able to see a fuller picture of what’s going on across the entire corporation, without the silo effect that tends to happen within subsidiaries and divisions.

NetSuite also announced that numerous partners will be reselling it, including Dell via its cloud-integration service Boomi, IBM via its Cast Iron Systems integration unit, as well as Pervasive Software and Informatica.

The company says it expects to see 50,000 attendees this year, and is featuring more than 2,500 sessions presented by more than 3,500 speakers across 14 individual venues. And forget about booking a hotel room in San Francisco this week: People attending OpenWorld have booked nearly 98,000 hotel nights.

So what’s on the agenda? Expect to hear a lot about the cloud. Oracle’s latest update to its core database software, known as 12c, will be unveiled. It’s the first major revision to Oracle’s database software in about five years. The “c” naturally stands for cloud, which Oracle is going to be embracing in a significant way at this event.

The speeches kick off Sunday night with the first of two keynotes from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Co-President and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd is speaking twice as well, once on Monday and again on Thursday.

Oracle is likely to continue to challenge the notion that it’s on the defensive from companies like Salesforce.com. Ellison has publicly disparagedSalesforce and another cloud-based software company Workday, both of which compete directly with Oracle.

Salesforce (whose recent Dreamforce conference also blocked traffic) has built what’s forecast to be a $3 billion annual business selling customer relationship software that runs in the cloud, and its CEO Marc Benioff is a former Oracle exec and Ellison protégé. Workday, due for a $400 million initial public offering soon, is run by Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield, the founders of PeopleSoft, a company Oracle acquired in a hostile takeover. It offers a breed of software known as human capital management software used by HR departments at big companies.

Ellison and Benioff have feuded — sometimes publicly — over their competing visions of the cloud and how software should be delivered to large companies. Benioff is fond of saying that if a company ever takes delivery of a server at a loading dock, they’re not running the “true cloud.” Ellison — who also has a significant hardware business to consider — argues that big customers need a mixed approach: Where some will be happy farming out the work of managing the hardware to someone else, others will want to own it outright, while still others will want to mix and match. He’s also fond of pointing out that Salesforce is a big customer of Oracle’s database.

Oracle isn’t the only company arguing for the mixed cloud approach. IBM and Hewlett-Packard and Dell — hardware vendors all — tend to see the cloud in this way, as does Microsoft, which offers its products in both hosted and on-premise varieties.

Still, there’s no mistaking Oracle has come to embrace the “software-as-a-service” model long personified by Benioff and Bhusri as well as Netsuite, a cloud software player run by former Oracle exec Zach Nelson and in which Ellison is an investor. (Nelson is speaking at Openworld, too.) Oracle is pivoting toward delivering all of its software as a service, allowing customers to choose which approach best suits them. On Oracle’s last earnings call, Hurd made a point of calling out a long list of customer wins for cloud-based CRM and HCM offerings: Accenture, Adobe, Cisco Systems — where Benioff is a new director — Colgate-Palmolive and Proctor & Gamble are all running Oracle applications in the cloud.

Indeed, Oracle has said it is now the second-largest company offering software-as-a-service behind Salesforce itself. It reported $1 billion in bookings for cloud software in June. Expect an update on the size of that business in Ellison’s remarks.

Much of that growth has come from Oracle’s aggressive pace of acquisitions. It has been gobbling up cloud-based software companies such as RightNow and Taleo.

And Oracle’s service offerings don’t stop at software: They extend to hardware, too. Customers can purchase ExaData and ExaLogic hardware and then run them inside an Oracle-owned and -maintained data center. The point is to get the hardware up and running quickly without having to bear the time and expense associated with setting it up.

So, if you care about the cloud — and nearly everyone in enterprise IT does these days — it’s going to be an interesting week.

Chatterbox: This is the offering that Benioff telegraphed last week, and which raised so many eyebrows. Salesforce calls it the “Dropbox for the Enterprise,” laying aside the fact that one called Box already exists. Anyway, the point is to “manage and share files in the context of business,” as the press release says. Once you get employees collaborating via social tools, they’re going to want to share files they can work on together within that context. Box, in which Salesforce is an investor, is one target, as is Dropbox. But so is Microsoft’s SharePoint.

Salesforce Identity: Once you get into the business of integrating a bunch of cloud services into one place, you need to manage all the sign-on credentials involved. This is the reason that the start-up Okta exists. Salesforce is essentially aiming to compete with Okta.

Work.com: Remember when cloud-based human resource and talent-management software companies were being acquired at a rapid pace, in part because of the rise of Workday? Salesforce got into the act, too, by acquiring a tiny HR cloud player called Rypple. Work.com is its new name.

Salesforce Touch: One of the earliest companies to see the potential for Apple’s iPad as a tool for use in the enterprise was Salesforce.com. It had early versions of its core customer-relationship management applications in the App Store, and has since expanded its reach to Android and other platforms. Today, it’s kicking that commitment to mobile up a notch. Salesforce Touch uses HTML5, allowing it to work easily on iOS and Android tablets and phones; it is optimized for touch interface. The point is to make Salesforce easy to get at when on the go — and sales people always are on the go — so they can take advantage of just a few minutes of downtime and get things done from a mobile device.

Chatter Communities for Partners: There are a lot of reasons why a company might want to build a social community. The classic example I can think of is a videogame company that wants to support people working their way through the levels of a tough game. But you might want to set up a social network of vendors you buy from, or distributors who resell your products, or third parties who support what you sell. The idea is to make creating that community easy and full-featured from the start, so there’s not so much expense and effort involved. It’s built on Chatter, which is Salesforce’s enterprise social and collaboration platform.

Data.com Social Key: It’s one thing to ask a sales lead what he thinks about something, but quite another to keep track of what he or she tweets or blogs about on that same topic, and often it can yield some insight to help close a deal. Up to now, Data.com has been Salesforce’s go-to offering for background intelligence on sales leads, combining things like Dun & Bradstreet profiles with contact information from Jigsaw. Social Key brings information gleaned from Twitter and blogs and YouTube videos into the mix.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Salesforce’s two biggest acquisitions in recent memory are Buddy Media and Radian6. With the Marketing Cloud, Salesforce aims to combine the strengths of the two, to draw together disparate strings of conversations with customers via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and online communities. It also helps create and manage marketing campaigns within those communities, and helps to track the results of those efforts.

Heroku Enterprise for Java: Oracle’s Java is the most widely used programming language in use in the Enterprise. Today, Heroku, the cloud-based software-development service that Salesforce acquired in 2010 , is for the first time embracing the community of Java developers. Getting a Java app built means assembling a bunch of different tools piecemeal from different sources. The new Java service gets software developers fully ready to get right to work with a single click, which saves a lot of time and effort, and thus reduces the cost of development. One other feature sure to be popular with the developers is integration with Atlassian, a collaboration tool that is geared toward the needs of programmers.

It’s worth nothing that Salesforce shares have been trading up considerably in the last month or so, in part because of the anticipation of Dreamforce, but also on Salesforce’s strong results. Today, the shares are up by $1.09, to $157.38, which amounts to a 61 percent increase this year to date. Say what you will about the Salesforce Kool-Aid, its shareholders like the taste.

There’s another drama playing out ahead of Benioff’s keynote, concerning what he may or may not say about a series of features and services called Chatterbox that Salesforce is launching. Last week, Benioff surprised a lot of people by declaring at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that he was gearing up to launch services that would compete with Box, the enterprise cloud file-sharing and collaboration service, and also with Okta, a cloud identity-management service.

Aaron Levie, Box’s CEO, said he had seen the service coming for a few months now, and that it was, in a sense, inevitable. Salesforce’s Chatter social enterprise service would in time need a robust file-sharing capability built into it, anyway.

Since then, I’ve checked in with Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta. His reaction was pretty close to that of Levie’s. He has known that it was coming for awhile, and Salesforce had to do it anyway. “Salesforce is realizing that, with the cloud and a mobile work force, managing the identity layer is a key part of it,” McKinnon told me Monday. “They finally woke up to it. It’s a little unnerving when someone as big as Salesforce gets into your space, but it makes it clear to our customers and partners that this is a big deal we’re working on, so in that sense, it’s a big validation.”

With so many companies adopting cloud services and creating accounts for employees on all of them, McKinnon left Salesforce, where he had headed up its engineering efforts, to start Okta. The service gathers up all those cloud account credentials and passwords and creates a single sign-on for all of them, making them easy to manage. Salesforce.com is one of the 1,351 services it works with. Others include Box, Google Apps, NetSuite, Workday and Microsoft’s Windows Azure.

McKinnon takes some encouragement from the data he sees courtesy of his own service. Offering a service for unified sign-ons makes Okta sort of a barometer for the cloud ecosystem, he says. Chatter, Salesforce’s social service, is more or less central to Salesforce’s efforts to unify its many offerings, and is the company’s answer to services like Jive and Yammer that have sought to make the process of collaborating within a company a little more akin to using Facebook.

Salesforce’s promotion of Chatter helped Jive and Yammer seem more legitimate. “Salesforce put all this money and effort behind Chatter, but it didn’t kill Yammer or Jive, it only accelerated their business,” McKinnon said. Jive IPO’d last year, and Yammer was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion over the summer. “Once Salesforce comes out with its identity management product, I think more people will look at us.”

So, how much of a competitive threat does McKinnon see from Salesforce? Some, but announcements aren’t products. And there’s the rub. Salesforce, McKinnon says, has a habit of making big announcements from the stage at Dreamforce, and then not following up, or at least not following up to the extent that the pronouncements from the keynote stage would seem to imply. “Salesforce is in many ways a marketing-driven company,” he says. “We’ll have to see how they execute. The real proof will be in how they follow up this Dreamforce announcement.”

But when you’re a company with a lot of industrial-grade Internet infrastructure, including, say, a few of your own data centers, the rules can change a little bit, and you have the option of being a little more selective in determining how your data flows. And when you’re the Enterprise cloud and file-sharing and collaboration outfit Box, you turn that advantage into something your far-flung customers can take advantage of.

When file are big — and in business, they always are — and you need to share something, uploads can be a time-consuming pain in the neck. So Box today launched a network of what it calls Box Accelerators. A network of servers distributed around the world, they serve as outposts for Box’s primary data centers. Box customers around the world will be able to upload to these Accelerators, and thus speed things up, say CEO Aaron Levie. In some cases, Box is bringing to bear its relationship with Amazon Web Services, and that company’s global footprint.

“We’re making a big push on international expansion,” Levie told me in a conversation at Box’s Los Altos, Calif., headquarters last week. Over the summer, the company opened a new office in London, and announced plans to hire 100 people there, in order to double down on opportunities it sees in Europe.

Media companies, health-care companies, and companies and institutions engaged in scientific research often have to move large, cumbersome files around in order to make them available for collaboration with colleagues. The primary factor in slowing down that process is distance. For all the vaunted rhetoric of how the Internet makes the world a smaller place, when it comes to moving gigabytes or more at a time, the one thing standing in your way is the distance between you and the server you’re uploading to.

The network of Accelerators are intended to shorten that distance. Box customers will get a choice of servers closest to them, and those servers in turn will have an easier time of communicating with Box’s main servers at its network of data centers, including a newish-one in Las Vegas, and another two in California.

The service is going live in nine different regions around the world on every continent except Africa, and is available free of charge for existing Box customers. And while today the network is specified only for uploads, it will in time enhance the speed of downloads as well, Levie told me. And it will also be addressable by Box’s API, meaning that if you’re building an application that takes advantage of Box’s network, the accelerators will be available for use.

I took advantage of a few minutes with Levie to ask him about his reaction to last week’s disclosure by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that he’s close to announcing a service called Chatterbox that will essentially compete with Box. Benioff will likely talk in detail about Chatterbox in his keynote address at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference on Wednesday. Expect collaboration and file-sharing to become part of Salesforce’s Chatter social platform soon.

Levie said he’s known about Salesforce’s intentions in this area for about four months to six months. “We’ve known about it, frankly they kind of have to do it,” he said. “If you think about Chatter, and Jive, Yammer, that kind of social world, it necessarily has to connect up to your content. And Salesforce is trying to carve out the space that Chatter can play in. It’s not enough to be a standalone social platform. Salesforce has basically realized that Chatter has to be able to solve more problems for the enterprise before they can have a serious conversation with a CIO.”

Content that companies share both internally and with partners, vendors, suppliers and customers has to be enhanced with social collaboration features. This is the very essence of companies like Jive and Yammer, and Salesforce’s product in this area known as Chatter. “Salesforce will take what it has as a social platform and add content to it,” Levie said. “What we’re doing is more like the inverse. We have a content platform, and we bring social aspects to it, where relevant. We work with all of the social platforms out there, and we’re going to be building more collaborative capabilities into Box.”

You might think this would be a tad awkward, given the fact that Salesforce is an investor in Box, and is even said to have offered to acquire Box last year, for north of $500 million.

Not at all, Levie says. “There are lots of precedents for companies being both investors, partners and competitors.” To me, it sounds like a diplomatic way of saying “game on.”

On the big side, there was the $750 million deal for Buddy Media, which Salesforce announced in June after word of a pending deal first leaked in May. Then, in July, it dropped $76 million on the co-browsing start-up GoInstant.

But its tastes also run toward the very small. Example: Salesforce recently acquired an Israeli data-mining start-up called BlueTail. BlueTail’s founder and CTO has been made chief data scientist at Data.com, a Salesforce unit. Indeed, the deal has all the markings of a classic “acqhire” situation. A Salesforce spokeswoman confirmed the acquisition to AllThingsD on Monday.

The giveaway clue was a batch of LinkedIn profiles belonging to former BlueTail employees who have since updated their information indicating that they now work for Salesforce. Data.com’s new chief data scientist is Alon Talmor. He and co-founder and CEO Koby Ben-Zvi have both changed their LinkedIn profiles in recent days to reflect new senior positions within Salesforce.com. In Ben-Zvi’s case, his new title is vice president for product strategy at Data.com.

At least three other people who list prior positions at Tel Aviv-based BlueTail have also updated their LinkedIn profiles with new jobs at Salesforce: Amir Cohen, Yaniv Zecharya and Elad Tsur, who also lists himself as a founder of BlueTail. Not much is known about BlueTail specifically, other than it was previously known as Mined Analytics and was founded in 2009.

Salesforce hasn’t sought to keep the acquisition a total secret. Nathan Crystal, a Salesforce VP for business development in Israel, appears to have made reference to the acquisition in remarks at a Salesforce conference in Israel, covered by a local tech publication. See a translation from the Hebrew here.

Shares of Salesforce are falling and falling big in after-hours trading as the cloud-software concern reported quarterly results that beat all the forecasts of Wall Street analysts, but which included an outlook for the quarter and year ahead that fell short of expectations.

Soon after markets closed, Salesforce shares took a 5 percent haircut, falling by $8.31 to $138.46. That drop comes on top of a drop of more than 1 percent during the regular session, when the shares finished at $146.77.

Earnings for the quarter were 42 cents per share, beating the consensus of 39 cents. Revenue was $732 million versus the consensus of $728.3 million. So far so good.

Then came the outlook: Salesforce said it expects revenue to come in at between $773 million and $777 million, soundly beating the expectation of $771 million and change. Still good.

The problem was with the EPS expectation, which one must remember is a non-GAAP profit to begin with. Salesforce says it will be 31 cents to 32 cents a share, versus a consensus of 34 cents. (On a GAAP basis, which no one pays attention to, Salesforce still expects to report losses in the range of 26 cents to 27 cents, and of 72 cents to 75 cents for the full year.)

Okay, everyone freak out. More as I go through the numbers.

Here’s the Salesforce announcement.

Salesforce.com Announces Fiscal 2013 Second Quarter Results
- Quarterly Revenue of $732 Million, up 34% Year-Over-Year
- Quarterly Operating Cash Flow of $136 Million, up 64% Year-Over-Year
- Deferred Revenue of $1.34 Billion, up 43% Year-Over-Year
- Unbilled Deferred Revenue Increases to Approximately $2.8 Billion
- Raises FY13 Revenue Guidance to $3.025 – $3.035 Billion

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 23, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — Salesforce.com (CRM), the enterprise cloud computing (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, today announced results for its fiscal second quarter ended July 31, 2012.

“Our second quarter revenue growth was outstanding at 34% in dollars and 37% in constant currency,” said Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Salesforce.com’s social enterprise strategy is enabling companies to connect with customers, partners, and employees in completely new ways – and it’s creating new opportunities for their growth and ours.”

Salesforce.com delivered the following results for its fiscal second quarter:

Revenue: Total Q2 revenue was $732 million, an increase of 34% on a year-over-year basis. Subscription and support revenues were $687 million, an increase of 35% on a year-over-year basis. Professional services and other revenues were $44 million, an increase of 20% on a year-over-year basis.

Earnings per Share: Q2 GAAP net loss per share was ($0.07), and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $0.42. The company’s non-GAAP results exclude the effects of $85 million in stock-based compensation expense, $20 million in amortization of purchased intangibles, and $6 million in net non-cash interest expense related to the company’s convertible senior notes. Non-GAAP EPS calculations are based on approximately 146 million diluted shares outstanding during the quarter, including approximately 3 million shares associated with the company’s convertible senior notes. GAAP EPS calculations are based on a basic share count of approximately 139 million shares.

Cash: Cash generated from operations for the fiscal second quarter was $136 million, an increase of 64% on a year-over-year basis. Total cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities finished the quarter at $1.8 billion.

Deferred Revenue: Deferred revenue on the balance sheet as of July 31, 2012 was $1.34 billion, an increase of 43% on a year-over-year basis. Current deferred revenue increased by 38% year-over-year to $1.27 billion, benefited in part by longer invoice durations. Non-current deferred revenue increased by 293% year-over-year to $69 million. Unbilled deferred revenue, representing business that is contracted but unbilled and off balance sheet, ended the second quarter at approximately $2.8 billion, up from approximately $2.7 billion at the end of the fiscal first quarter.

As of August 23, 2012, salesforce.com is initiating revenue, GAAP EPS and non-GAAP EPS guidance for its fiscal third quarter of fiscal year 2013. In addition, for the full fiscal year 2013, the company is raising its revenue and non-GAAP EPS guidance previously provided on June 4, 2012, and initiating GAAP EPS guidance.

Q3 FY13 Guidance: Revenue for the company’s third fiscal quarter is projected to be in the range of $773 million to $777 million, an increase of 32% to 33% year-over-year.

GAAP net loss per share is expected to be in the range of ($0.27) to ($0.26), while diluted non-GAAP EPS is expected to be in the range of $0.31 to $0.32. The non-GAAP estimate excludes the effects of stock-based compensation expense, expected to be approximately $99 million, amortization of purchased intangibles related to acquisitions, expected to be approximately $27 million, and net non-cash interest expense related to the convertible senior notes, expected to be approximately $6 million. EPS estimates assume a GAAP tax rate of approximately 37%, and a non-GAAP tax rate of approximately 35%. The GAAP EPS calculation assumes an average basic share count of approximately 142 million shares, and the non-GAAP EPS calculation assumes an average fully diluted share count of approximately 151 million shares.

Full Year FY13 Guidance: Revenue for the company’s full fiscal year 2013 is projected to be in the range of $3.025 billion to $3.035 billion, an increase of 33% to 34% year-over-year.

For the company’s full fiscal year 2013, GAAP net loss per share is expected to be in the range of ($0.75) to ($0.72) while diluted non-GAAP EPS is expected to be in the range of $1.48 to $1.51. The non-GAAP estimate excludes the effects of stock-based compensation expense, expected to be approximately $382 million, amortization of purchased intangibles related to acquisitions, expected to be approximately $95 million, and net non-cash interest expense related to the convertible senior notes, expected to be approximately $24 million. EPS estimates assume a GAAP tax rate of approximately 30%, and a non-GAAP tax rate of approximately 37%. The GAAP EPS calculation assumes an average basic share count of approximately 141 million shares, and the non-GAAP EPS calculation assumes an average fully diluted share count of approximately 150 million shares.

One of the bigger ones is Oracle’s OpenWorld, which runs from Sept. 30 to Oct. 4 in San Francisco. The software giant just announced on its Web site that it has hired Pearl Jam to play an event on Oct. 3, with Kings of Leon also on the bill. They join Oracle’s expanding roster of big-name acts, which includes Sting, who played at OpenWorld in May of 2011.

That makes the fall start to look like a battle of the bands from the early 1990s. Salesforce.com has its own Dreamforce event running Sept. 18 to 22, and the company has hired the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were preceded by Metallica last year, and Stevie Wonder the year before that.

If last year’s OpenWorld is any indicator, there may be some fireworks. Remember that Oracle booted Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff from its keynote stage during last October’s OpenWorld. The kerfuffle was a high-profile blip in a complicated, slowly simmering feud between Benioff and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Benioff later made it sound like an argument in a high-school cafeteria, saying it had something to do with something he said about Ellison on Facebook. Given how close the events are on the calendar, they’ll probably find ways to tweak each other in public.

Below is Pearl Jam’s 2009 video “Amongst the Waves,” which is the video Oracle has embedded on its conference-promotion site:

The idea is to let companies create their own environments where they share information internally and with partners and customers of their choosing. Exposing business processes to the kind of social flows that we’ve become accustomed to on Facebook and Twitter allows vendors and customers to participate in discussions more readily. As Salesforce puts it, this amounts to “breaking down the boundaries of the business.”

Most products that bring companies into the same place with the other entities they do business with are focused purely on the conversation, or on getting transactions done. Communities, Salesforce says, will let them do a lot more.

Deploy communities to support any business process — from franchises sharing best practices, to high-end retailers delivering custom shopping experiences, to universities looking to connect students with alumni.

If it sounds a lot like Chatter, it should, though that brand name appears almost nowhere in the announcement. It’s being run by Doug Bewsher, Salesforce’s SVP for Chatter. But the fact is that Chatter isn’t quite getting the traction that companies like Jive and Yammer are getting.

Salesforce’s news happened to drop on the same day as word of a major upgrade from Yammer, which is in the process of being absorbed into Microsoft. The software giant said in June that it would pay $1.26 billion for Yammer.

Among the new features is an in-box that gives the user a quick glance at new messages meant for their eyes, including mentions, group messages they’re included in and private messages. Another is a homepage view that, at a glance, gives you a look at what people in your company are buzzing about and what files are being actively shared.

There’s also a “presence” feature that indicates when someone is online at that moment, so you can start a conversation with them; you can easily add more users to the conversation as needed.

As you may remember, Yammer and Salesforce have a history of being rivals. Last year, Yammer launched a promotional campaign called “Friends with Benefits” that touted the fact that Yammer integrated data from Chatter, though they acted more like Frenemies.

Piper Jaffray analyst Mark Murphy wrote in a note to clients this morning that Salesforce has closed a huge deal worth more than one landed earlier this year with State Farm Insurance — that deal was valued at $140 million. It’s not clear who the Salesforce deal was with.

Salesforce doesn’t disclose any of its biggest customers. In its most recent 10-K, it said that one customer it didn’t name accounted for 6 percent of accounts receivable as of Jan. 31, and beyond that, no single customer accounted for 5 percent or more of accounts receivable.

A hypothetical deal at $140 million would account for about 6 percent of 2012 revenue; though, since Salesforce tends to amortize its sales like subscriptions, it will probably avoid having to disclose all the juicy details.

The deal was unexpected, Murphy says, and comes 10 days before Salesforce reports quarterly earnings on Aug. 23. It’s also unusual in that deals of this size typically close late in the year, when companies are using up the last of their purchasing budgets and making big plans for the year ahead. One suspicion: It might be a company whose fiscal fourth quarter is ending in August.

Anyway, I reached out to Salesforce, and its spokeswoman declined to comment, citing its quiet period. The deal might also be the one that CEO Marc Benioff referred to when he said, on a recent earnings call, that the deal pipeline looked “unlike anything we’ve ever seen in size and scale.”

Salesforce shares rose by nearly 3 percent, to $143.88, which amounts to a year-to-date increase of about 42 percent. That is certainly impressive, though even at that level, the shares are trading only 5 percent higher than they were at this time last year.

Benioff’s addition to Cisco’s board fits perfectly with the ongoing shake-up that CEO John Chambers has been undergoing during the last year or so. Once you get Chambers talking about the new strategy at Cisco, you only hear the word “cloud” about 200 times in five minutes.

Of course I’m exaggerating a bit, but the fact is that the cloud is what Benioff is all about. A former Oracle VP and acolyte of its CEO Larry Ellison, Benioff founded Salesforce a little more than a decade ago on the then-radical proposition that you didn’t have to install any software on your local computer to run a customer-relationship management (CRM) database.

Back then they called it software-as-a-service, or SaaS, but more often than not, the concept of running applications in this manner is interchangeably described as being “in the cloud.”

And the fact is that Cisco is emerging as an important player in cloud infrastructure, specifically its Unified Computing System, or UCS, which combines networking and servers in single, easy-to-buy product. Long known primarily for its networking chops, Cisco has emerged as the world’s No. 3 vendor of blade servers, according to the reckoning of market research firm IDC.

Also joining Cisco’s board is Kristina Johnson. She runs a clean-energy company called Enduring Hydro. She was Under Secretary of Energy in the Obama Administration, confirmed in May of 2009, and stepped down at the end of 2010. Before that, Johnson was the provost at The Johns Hopkins University.

Here’s the announcement:

Cisco Appoints Marc Benioff and Kristina Johnson to Board of Directors

SAN JOSE, CA–(Marketwire -08/02/12)- Cisco (CSCO) today announced the appointment of Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of salesforce.com, and Dr. Kristina M. Johnson, CEO of Enduring Hydro, LLC and former Under Secretary of Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy, to its board of directors effective August 1, 2012.

“We are extremely pleased to welcome Marc and Kristina to Cisco’s board of directors,” said John Chambers, Cisco chairman and CEO. “Marc has changed the face of technology through his bold ideas around cloud computing and the social enterprise. Kristina brings us an unmatched expertise in science and technology, which will help guide Cisco as we continue to innovate and transform our customers’ experiences.”

Benioff, 47, co-founded salesforce.com in February of 1999 and has served as chairman of the board of directors since its inception. He has served as CEO of salesforce.com, which was selected by Forbes as the World’s Most Innovative Company in 2011, since November of 2001. Prior to launching salesforce.com, Benioff, a 30-year veteran of the software industry, spent 13 years at Oracle.

Johnson, 55, currently serves as CEO of Enduring Hydro, LLC, a clean energy development and consulting company. In her previous role as under secretary of energy, she was responsible for managing a broad $10.5 billion energy and environment portfolio. Prior to this role, Johnson served as provost and senior vice president for Academic Affairs at The Johns Hopkins University and dean of the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University. She currently serves on the board of directors of Boston Scientific Corporation and The AES Corporation. Johnson is also an inventor and entrepreneur, holding more than 45 U.S. patents. Johnson has received the John Fritz Medal, widely considered the highest award given in the engineering profession.

With the appointment of Benioff and Johnson, Cisco’s board now consists of 14 members, including Carol A. Bartz, former CEO, Yahoo! Inc.; M. Michele Burns, former chairman and CEO, Mercer LLC; Michael D. Capellas, former CEO, VCE Company, LLC; Larry R. Carter, former SVP, Office of the Chairman and CEO, Cisco Systems, Inc.; John T. Chambers, chairman and CEO, Cisco Systems, Inc.; Brian L. Halla, former chairman and CEO, National Semiconductor Corporation; John L. Hennessy, Ph.D., president, Stanford University; Richard M. Kovacevich, retired chairman and CEO, Wells Fargo & Company; Roderick C. McGeary, chairman, Tegile Systems, Inc.; Arun Sarin, KBE, senior advisor, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and former CEO of Vodafone Group Plc; Steven M. West, founder and partner, Emerging Company Partners LLC; and Jerry Yang, co-founder and former chief Yahoo!, Yahoo! Inc.