Investing.com – Salesforce.com led the rally in tech Wednesday after the cloud company's blowout third-quarter report fuelled bullish calls from analysts on Wall Street.
Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) soared 10% after it smashed Wall Street estimates on both the top and bottom lines.
Analysts attributed the upbeat report to strong performance in billings, which grew 27%, well above consensus of 19%.
"Billings was driven by strength across all clouds as both renewals and new business led to outperformance in the quarter," William Blair said in a note.
But the outlook for the current quarter came in just below expectations, though analysts at Baird said CEO Mark Benioff's comments "around strong macro in Americas and APAC should remove portions of bear case around uncertain 2019."
Cloud software company Nutanix (NASDAQ:NTNX) reported Tuesday a narrower loss for the fiscal first-quarter than analysts had expected, sending its share price more than 9% higher.
The strong quarter appeared to reassure investors that the company's strategy to phase out its hardware business and move entirely into higher-margin software products would eventually spur growth.
Chip stocks also supported tech as Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) rose 3% after Mizuho analyst Vijay Rakesh said GPU pricing was starting to pick up from the September lows as excess inventories were shrinking.
Nvidia shares have come under pressure recently after management warned that a "crypto hangover," had led to excess inventories.