Salesforce spikes to an all-time high as Wall Street buys into its growth story

Salesforce stock closed at an all-time high on Wednesday, as Wall Street continues to be impressed by the 17-year old cloud software maker's robust growth across almost all segments.

Salesforce reached a closing price of $83.57 Wednesday, just a day after breaking its previous $82.14 record, which was set in December.

Salesforce shares have jumped nearly 55% since early February when the overall tech market was hit by fears of a broader industry slowdown.

The surge in Salesforce's stock price largely has to do with its blow-out quarter reported last week. Salesforce reported $1.92 billion in revenue, up 27% year-over-year, while raising its full year revenue guidance to the range of $8.16 billion to $8.20 billion.

Billings, an important metric that measures future revenue, was up 31% from the same quarter of last year, while it passed $1 billion in operating cash flow for the first time, proving its core business is minting serious cash every quarter.

"What you're seeing now are big time cash flows, expanding margins, GAAP profitability and all of this even as organic growth has maintained a consistent level, or has even accelerated, as we saw in this quarter," Stifel's managing director Tom Roderick told Business Insider.

A lot of that growth is coming at the expense of incumbant on-premise software makers, like Oracle and SAP, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff argues. Oracle shares are up only about 15% over the past 3 months, while SAP has remained mostly flat.

"One of the reasons that we are doing so well is because Oracle and SAP are doing so poorly in the cloud, they just have not been able to make that transformation that we've made," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said during the earnings call.

In fact, Salesforce said it signed another big deal that's worth over $100 million last quarter, after signing two of those 9-figure deals in the quarter before that. Even Sales Cloud, its largest revenue-driving service that seemed to slow down in recent years, re-accelerated its growth to 15% in the quarter.

And Salesforce's numbers indicate that its growth won't slowdown anytime soon. Roderick says Salesforce has proven to be a sticky product for its customers and that it will continue to draw bigger companies to spend more on its products.

"Software profitability is driven almost entirely from a combination of scale and recurring revenue. Salesforce is building both of these, with an $8 billion-plus revenue run rate, improving profitability and declining dollar churn rates," Roderick said. "As Salesforce continues to build larger and more mission critical relationships with the world's largest enterprises, scale increases, dollar churn typically decreases and the cash flow spigot runs faster and more reliably."