Salesforce.com looks on track to fulfil chief executive Marc Benioff’s ambition to create a $1bn company, after reporting a 50 per cent year-on-year rise in sales for the fourth quarter.

The on-demand pioneer notched up $216.9m in revenues on the back of what Benioff called “the most incredible quarter … in our history”. That closing period helped Salesforce to reach $748.7m for the full year and saw the company predict that its next fiscal year will pass the totemic $1bn mark.

Benioff has made no secret of the fact that crashing through that barrier would be an important mark of acceptance. It could also help Salesforce fend off competitors in the on-demand sector such as SAP, NetSuite and others.

Today, NetSuite unveiled NS-BOS (a pun on MS-DOS), its free “software-as-a-service business operating system”. NS-BOS brings together the SuiteFlex toolkit and new D-Bug diagnostics with SuiteBundler, a means of delivering optimisations, customisations and vertical solutions to the core NetSuite business applications platform.

Salesforce.com earlier this week updated its own Force.com developer platform with support for Adobe AIR and Flex for creating rich internet applications.