By Aaron Tilley

Business-software provider Salesforce.com Inc. posted record quarterly sales and raised its full-year guidance, showcasing the sustained appetite for cloud-computing services during the coronavirus pandemic.

Enterprises have been accelerating their shift to digital processes during the health crisis, fueling investor enthusiasm for companies that enable the transition. Several startups are trying to capture this momentum and are making plans to tap public markets.

San Francisco-based Salesforce on Tuesday said sales grew 29% to $5.15 billion in the most recent quarter, beating Wall Street's expectation of $4.87 billion in revenue, according to analysts surveyed by FactSet. Salesforce said it generated a $2.85 per-share profit, in part based on accounting adjustments.

Starting next week, Salesforce's stock will be one of the 30 making up the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The stock is being added in part to help offset the effects of Apple Inc.'s planned four-to-one stock split that would have given the information-technology sector a smaller representation in blue chip index.

Cloud-computing was already one of the hottest areas in tech before the pandemic, and that momentum has largely remained as businesses have shifted to remote-work and as people stuck at home live more of their daily lives online. The demand has helped lift shares of the biggest cloud infrastructure providers. Shares in e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc., the No. 1 cloud infrastructure provider, are up more than 80% this year, and rival Microsoft Corp.'s stock is around 37% higher.

The pandemic hasn't been entirely a financial boon for cloud-services providers, with some customers having to cut spending or struggling to make payments as they deal with the wider economic effects of Covid-19.

Salesforce, however, lifted its full-year outlook on Tuesday after cutting expectations in the previous quarter when it said it had to provide payment relief to some customers. The company said it expects sales in the current financial year that runs through the end of January to increase to between $20.7 billion and $20.8 billion. It previously cut its outlook to around $20 billion in sales from as high as $21.1 billion.

Salesforce's stock has risen more than 30% this year and was up more than 12% in after-hours trading following the results.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., which is also focused on helping companies with their digital transformation, on Tuesday said sales rose 13% from the prior quarter to $6.8 billion, though sales were still lagging behind the year-ago period. Its shares rose more than 6% in after-hours trading.

"Navigating through the pandemic and planning for a post-Covid[-19] world have increased customers' needs for as-a-service offerings, secure connectivity, remote work capabilities and analytics to unlock insights from data that are aligned to our strategy," HPE Chief Executive Antonio Neri said.

Several software companies are looking to capitalize on investor appetite for businesses focused on the cloud. Snowflake Inc. plans to go public in the coming weeks in one of the most anticipated initial public offerings in the business-software market this year. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company specializes in so-called data warehouse software, where all of a company's disparate data is stored in a central location. Snowflake said it had $264.7 million in revenue in its last full financial year that ended Jan. 31 and generated a loss of $348.5 million.

Also joining the rush to the public markets is Sumo Logic Inc. of Redwood City, Calif., a cloud-based provider of software that analyzes business data. The company said its sales in the last full year rose 50% to $155.1 million, and it generated a loss of $92.1 million.

JFrog Ltd., a software-development company based in Sunnyvale, Calif., and San Francisco-based Unity Software Inc., a game-development and design platform, also filed to go public. Both provide tools for developers to create applications for the cloud.

Palantir Technologies Inc., the data-analytics company co-founded by investor Peter Thiel, shows that enterprise-software investors sometimes have to be patient. The company is one of Silicon Valley's oldest startups and filed to go public last month. The company still generates hefty losses.

Salesforce also has tried to parlay the pandemic into new business opportunities. The company launched a set of tools, called Work.com, designed to help organizations safely go back to the office, though the company itself has said it won't recall workers until at least the middle of next year. Part of Work.com's suite of tools includes a contract-tracing application for employers to keep track of employees who are showing symptoms of Covid-19.

Salesforce said it expects to generate $5.24 billion to $5.25 billion in sales in the current quarter, above the $5.02 billion analysts' forecast.

Write to Aaron Tilley at aaron.tilley@wsj.com