Dive Brief:

• Salesforce reported record quarterly revenue for its first fiscal quarter of 2017 this week, putting the company on track to crack the $10 billion revenue mark.

• The company’s revenue was up 27% over the same period last year. Salesforce subsequently increased its fiscal year 2017 guidance by $80 million.

• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff also announced that the company plans to expand its relationship with Amazon Web Services.

Dive Insight:

Benioff said during an earnings call that Salesforce is working to aggressively expand its market through its AWS relationship, but said he would save the details for the company’s Dreamforce conference this summer.

"When you look at Amazon today, there is no public cloud that is more sophisticated or (has) done more for customers," Benioff said.

Benioff attributed a good deal of Salesforce’s current success to its ability to execute on the cloud. Salesforce’s biggest competitors, SAP and Oracle, have not been able to match the company’s cloud savvy, which has enabled Salesforce to move much more quickly.

"We're in the midst of a huge generational shift (to) people who want it now, want it easy," Benioff said. "And they're increasingly mobile."

Benioff said the company also plans to begin investigating the potential of artificial intelligence. In April, the Salesforce purchased artificial intelligence startup MetaMind, which uses deep learning to analyze enterprise customers' data to help them make better business decisions.

There was no mention on the call of Salesforce’s outage last week, which resulted in the loss of five hours of customer data.