Pacific Crest’s Brendan Barnicle this morning raised his price target on Salesforce.com (CRM) to $80 from $70, and repeated his Outperform rating. Barnicle says that channel checks on the company fiscal Q1 ended April were “better than expected.” Write Barnicle: “generally, we have heard that Salesforce.com’s momentum has continued to be strong.”

Barnicle asserts that the company’s subscription revenue is similar to the maintenance revenue at Oracle (ORCL) or SAP (SAP), since it has such a high renewal rate. But he says the company’s enterprise value-to-subscription revenue multiple is lower than its peers. He notes that Citrix (CTXS) trades at 8.8x 2009 revenue; apply the same multiple to CRM and you get $80, he says.

CRM today is up $1.59, or 2.3%, at $69.54.