The Salesforce West Building in San Francisco. (Salesforce Photo)

Salesforce continues to post strong revenue growth on its quest to put its marketing technology in the hands of every business on earth, beating financial analyst expectations for revenue and earnings per share in its most recent quarter.

For the period ending Oct. 31st, right before its massive Dreamforce conference, Salesforce recorded third-quarter revenue of $2.68 billion, up 25 percent compared to last year’s third quarter and slightly higher than analyst expectations of $2.65 billion. Minus special items, earnings per share were $0.39, also exceeding analyst estimates of $0.37.

Salesforce’s product groups saw nice growth across the board, in line with the overall growth that the software-as-a-service industry, which Salesforce helped create, is continuing to post in 2017. Its flagship Sales Cloud group posting 16 percent revenue growth and its Service Cloud group reporting an increase of 25 percent.

Salesforce president and chief product officer Bret Taylor. (Salesforce Photo)

The company has been adding new features powered by artificial intelligence to those products throughout the year, and during the quarter it rolled out a new version of its Einstein service that helps sales managers make better forecasts. AI was also the theme of Dreamforce, during which Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff struck a deal with Google and talked up new AI technology that lets any Salesforce user build a system for making predictions about customer behavior within the product.

On a conference call after the earnings were released, Benioff announced that Bret Taylor and Alex Dayon received promotions; both now report to Benioff, according to ZDnet. Taylor is now president and chief product officer, and Dayon is president and chief strategy officer.

Taylor joined Salesforce in 2016 after it acquired Quip, his document-management startup, He’s starting to build a nice legacy as a tech product designer after selling Friendfeed to Facebook in 2009, which forever altered the presentation of Facebook’s News Feed.

[Editor’s Note: Salesforce is a GeekWire annual sponsor.]

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