By Mylene Mangalindan

Many people know Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com, as Pied Piper of “software as a service.” But that piece of tech jargon, which refers to programs you access over the Internet via a Web browser, seems so 1999. So Benioff has moved on to “platform as a service,” a term that he sprinkled liberally through the San Francisco company’s earnings call Wednesday.

marc_benioffThe precise meaning is a bit elusive. But it points to various ways to let other developers build their own online services using Salesforce.com’s technology. There’s an offering called Force.com that fits in somehow, and another called the AppExchange. Partnerships seem to play a role, too: Last month, the company said it would make Google’s application products, such as word processing and spreadsheet programs, available to its customers. Later this summer, Salesforce will offer enhanced Google products with support, for a fee.

Salesforce.com doesn’t break out how much revenue comes from these third-party services, and how much comes from its bread-and-butter business of helping companies manage their sales teams. But something is working: Profit rose more than 10-fold in the first quarter and revenue jumped 52%.

Never bashful about expressing opinions, Benioff was in a mood to opine about others. He called SAP AG’s on-demand strategy a “huge train wreck,” and suggested a Microsoft offering has not appeared as a blip on his radar. No impediments at all to the inexorable force that is Salesforce.com? “We need a lot more salespeople,” he says.