(Reuters) -With sales of web-based business software soaring, companies that focus on cloud computing are slipping into a sweet spot as technology giants look to bolster their presence in this fast-growing segment.

Cloud computing, or software as a service, allows businesses to cut back on hardware and space by having their software hosted in remote datacenters they access over the Web.

Deep-pocketed technology firms like IBM (IBM.N) or Oracle Corp (ORCL.O) might be looking to snag deals in this area to complement their own traditional, mostly on-premise services.

Human resource management software makers SuccessFactors Inc (SFSF.O) and Taleo Corp (TLEO.O) and retail-focused software firm DemandTec Inc (DMAN.O) could be the early targets, according to analysts.

“The themes of cloud computing and software as service (SaaS) are so real, and it’s still so early, that I think there should be lot of activity,” said Raymond James analyst Terry Tillman.

Janney Montgomery Scott analyst Sasa Zorovic believes companies like NetSuite Inc (N.N), Rightnow Inc (RNOW.O), Kenexa Corp (KNXA.O) and Constant Contact (CTCT.O) could all be attractive takeover targets.

Most big players delayed entering the cloud space and now want the scalable platforms provided by these SaaS companies to build efficient applications.

“With the growth of software as a service, companies have an increasing need to integrate data and business processes across on-premise and cloud systems,” IBM said in a recent statement.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software provider Salesforce.com Inc (CRM.N), which helped pioneer software as a service and is one of the fastest-growing software stocks, might also be considered as a takeout target. However, its size and rich valuation might not make for an easily digestible deal.

Since these companies deliver their software products over the Internet, it saves clients the cost of buying licenses in advance and running programs on their own computers.

The adoption of software as a service is expected to far outpace market growth through 2013, a Gartner report shows.

Currently, Salesforce.com accounts for about half of overall web-based CRM software sales, according to the report.

NICHE SELLS

However, firms with niche products like SuccessFactors and Taleo are also seeing explosive growth, as smaller companies queue up to vie for a share of the pie.

“SuccessFactors is adding a lot of potential total addressable market to the mix with all the stuff they are getting into,” said Tillman.

The company, which makes software that helps firms manage staff performance, posted a 37 percent jump in 2009 revenue. Revenue for 2010 is expected to grow 18 percent to 19 percent.

The company trades at a whopping multiple of 1,138 times forward earnings — 25 times the sector average. Its shares have risen more than two and a half times in the last one year.

In contrast, Oracle trades at 14 times forward earnings and SAP at 17.

DemanTec, another possible target, provides pricing and merchandise optimization for retailers. Its largest customer is Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT.N).

“For DemandTec, it was initially about fitting large global retailers like Target Corp (TGT.N) or Walmart to buy the best buy, but then they started selling software to their suppliers,” Tillman said.

The company’s products manage the same stores sales environment and help improve gross margins, he said, which could make it a valuable addition to large systems integrators that these retailers rely on, or even large enterprise companies.

Shares of the company have, however, dropped about 40 percent in the last one year.

RECENT CONSOLIDATION

The software sector has recently seen a flurry of activity with SAP AG’s (SAPG.DE) offer to buy Sybase Inc (SY.N) and IBM’s move to acquire AT&T Inc’s (T.N) business-to-business software unit.

Analysts believe these buyouts could accelerate the pace of consolidation in the tech industry in the next 12 months to 18 months.

“Just the fact that a large application vendor like SAP could become more aggressive increases the urgency of what other players like Oracle, IBM, Hewlett Packard Co (HPQ.N) or Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) feel about M&A,” said Tom Roderick, analyst at Thomas Weisel.

Roderick’s pick in the SaaS space is Salesforce.com, but he said the company did not look like an immediate target.

“It is the property that has the most strategic value. It is the market leader in SaaS by a long shot and CRM technology is certainly one, if not the hottest, application sectors in the marketplace right now,” he said.

The company’s revenue grew 21 percent in fiscal 2010, compared with fiscal 2009 and is expected to grow 18 percent to 19 percent in fiscal 2011 to between $1.55 billion and $1.56 billion.

The company trades at 75 times forward earnings and its shares have more than doubled in value in the last 12 months.

Here are the top SaaS products used for the construction industry:

1. Pivotal CRM

Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real Estate is an industry-tailored customer relationship management system designed to help building and real estate firms better manage relationships throughout the customer lifecycle. Home Builders use Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real Estate to help them cost effectively deliver a superior customer experience.

2. Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Microsoft Dynamics CRM with the Construction Industry Solution enables you to manage all your business development, sales and marketing activity by client, contact, influencer and project. Specifically designed for all sectors of the Construction Industry, specialist versions are available for; Contractors, consultants & architects Building products and plant hire suppliers.

3. Aconex
Aconex is a SAAS product for document management in the construction industry. It has become so successful that is now the defacto standard in the construction industry for collaboration around construction projects.

4. Jonas
The Jonas solution is a fully integrated, highly flexible, industry specific software package designed for mid-sized construction and service management companies. They specialize in providing complete construction software products to run every facet of your operation, from construction accounting and job cost to service management and mobile field solutions.

5. ProjectMates
Projectmates Construction Management Software uses online Project Management Tools to aide in the complete life cycle development of your construction projects. While traditional tools for construction management lack critical work-flow and accountability features central to the project management process, our online collaborative software improves communication and accountability.

Web-based CRM provides a simpler, faster and cost-effective Customer Relationship Management services for businesses. It is easier and much affordable solution for customer relationship for businesses with IT and budget constraints. CRM applications can run on a standard web browser. In this,  I present the Top 5 SaaS web-based CRM Services for your convenience.

1. NETSUITE
Netsuite offers a comprehensive CRM solution set with customization tools. What makes it as a comprehensive package is because Netsuite is an on demand service with all in one front and back office solution. One of its unique features is the real time analytics dashboard that provides easy to view role specific business information which is always up-to-date.

2. SALESFORCE.COM
Salesforce.com is known to be a market leader in CRM. It combines the best of business processes and technology that provides powerful CRM services. Salesforce.com offers an array of CRM and business application services that allowa customers and subscribers to systematically record and store business data.

3. APLICOR
Aplicor delivers web-based CRM, ERP and accounting software to global midmarket and enterprise organizations. Its online CRM software and financial accounting solutions provide unique advantages in the areas of ease of use, business process automation, information analysis, software customization, and the complete delivery of enterprise-wide business systems.

4. SAGE
SageCRM.com offers CRM solution to enhance the power and convenience of web for marketing, sales, and customer care tools needed for marketing and selling industry leading service. Its software also provides tools for managing and analyzing all the current and historical data and activities.

5. MICROSOFT DYNAMICS CRM
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services is Microsoft’s online CRM that offers different plans for professional, advanced and enterprise level businesses. The web-based service gives more enhancement in customer service capabilities. It can automate workflow and provide analytics that helps to fillip the productivity of business.

Updated: SAP on Tuesday will demonstrate the latest portion of its on-demand strategy: A focus on “orchestration” and additional capabilities added as a service to its core systems such as Business Suite. Think of it as “on-premise on demand.” In addition, SAP plans to launch “starter packs” for Business ByDesign and lower the minimum seats to get more customer volume.

In a nutshell, John Wookey, executive vice president of large enterprise on demand at SAP, will demonstrate on-demand software designed for line-of-business needs. The conundrum outlined by Wookey goes like this:

* Customer installed big ERP suite;
* Wanted to upgrade functions;
* But didn’t have the budget;
* Customers got frustrated and went out and got software as a service to get that functionality.

Wookey, speaking at the SAP Sapphire conference in Orlando, said he doesn’t blame these customers for going out and getting SaaS, but he does see an opportunity to “bring cohesion to the model.” In some respects, Wookey’s plan could be a cure for SaaS sprawl. The rub: Customers that already have gone with SaaS in addition to an on-premise suite may not swap out for on-demand orchestration.

Customers have come to SAP and “said it would sure be nice if you could provide these things on-demand so we wouldn’t have to go to all of these other vendors,” said Wookey.

SAP is trying to adapt to the changing state of IT spending. Simply put, the CIO isn’t necessarily making the purchases. The chief marketing officer may be buying Salesforce.com and the HR head is going for SuccessFactors. Since the upfront spending is low for these on-demand apps, the CIO has been cut out.

Wookey, who is in charge of on-demand strategy at SAP, said the company plans to weave in collaboration throughout these on-demand add-ons. SAP’s game is to sell on-demand software that maps well to a company’s existing on-premise application. Tuesday’s demo will revolve around a product dubbed Sales on Demand, which is designed to improve on communication in the sales process.

SAP’s plan sounds a lot like Salesforce.com’s Chatter, which weaves collaboration inside the enterprise application.

Wookey said SAP plans to “make it easier to update specific business functions” for line of business managers. SAP already has a few of these on-demand add-ons for strategic sourcing and supplier management.

SAP will manage support for these on-demand add-ons and partner for infrastructure and hosting services. Some on-demand services are available today, but the ones demonstrated on Tuesday will be available in early 2011.

Update: Doug Merritt, executive vice president of the premier customer network for SAP, talked more about the on-demand strategy. The biggest takeaway: Merritt said that Business ByDesign is now in general availability. However, the company isn’t exactly screaming it from the rooftops and is looking for more viral sales.

Needless to say, Dennis Howlett, also in this meeting, wasn’t buying it. Indeed, it was hard to see how SAP would make Business ByDesign without a sales channel effort like NetSuite launched.

Merritt said that SAP’s on-demand parts taken as a whole can “reinvigorate the linkage with line of business,” something that may have been lost given Wookey’s comments.

SAP’s Merritt said Business ByDesign will offer starter packs with lower prices to garner volume. Pricing for starter packs will be rolled out later—possibly tomorrow. Business ByDesign prices will remain $149 a month per user for the entire suite. The minimum number of seats for Business ByDesign will also drop from 25 to 10.

Source

For widespread SaaS adoption, security solutions to control and protect critical data cannot come at the expense of functionality

PerspecSys Inc. (www.perspecsys.com), maker of a cloud data security platform that ensures full control and protection of sensitive data used in the public cloud, said today that the knowledge and governance gap that hinders the adoption of cloud-based software-as-a-service, or SaaS, may be narrowing but that significant work remains to be done.

The prospect of cloud computing has been broadly embraced by the marketplace due to the dramatic benefits it offers over traditional enterprise applications installed behind the user’s firewall. Gartner has forecast the worldwide SaaS market to double from $8 billion in 2009 to $16 billion by the end of 2013, as “tighter capital budgets in the current economic environment demand leaner alternatives, popularity increases, and interest for platform as a service and cloud computing grows.”

However, since SaaS offers almost immediate time to value, vendors such as Salesforce.com have enjoyed great success selling to line-of-business managers in enterprises, often bypassing the security and governance rigor associated with traditional software implementations.

This has created a governance gap that potentially makes these enterprises non-compliant with legal, regulatory or internal governance policies. For example, in the recent “Security of Cloud Computing” study by the Ponemon Institute and CA Inc., more than 50 percent of respondents in the U.S. said their organization was unaware of all the cloud services deployed in their enterprise. These rogue users threaten the security of the organization’s sensitive data.

“Enterprises that are adopting cloud applications such as Salesforce.com are increasingly doing so along with the implementation of SaaS security solutions,” said Jeff Campbell, president and CEO of PerspecSys. “This is indicative of IT adapting their infrastructure to address the unique security requirements for cloud computing in support of the evolving needs of the business. However, the key challenge that remains is ensuring security without sacrificing functionality.”

THE THREE LAYERS OF THE PUBLIC CLOUD

The public cloud is divided into three layers. The first is platform as a service (PaaS), which is governed by standards set forth by Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). The second is infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which is governed by the SAS 70 II auditing standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

The third layer, software as a service (SaaS), where user’s data resides, has attracted the most interest and positive response from the market place, yet it is the one layer of the cloud not governed by any standards to ensure data security.

THE SECURITY CONUNDRUM OF SAAS

This lack of security regulation and standard in the data layer presents huge adoption barriers for many enterprises.

In its March 2010 Security Spending Survey, Goldman Sachs observed a significant shift in user sentiment to cloud and SaaS solutions. In its survey, only 24 percent of respondents said they would not use any SaaS or cloud applications until they have more clarity on how to secure their data, compared to 46 percent in an October 2009 survey. Goldman Sachs attributed this shift in attitude to companies’ abilities to design customized solutions to solve some of the data security problems, as 20 percent, (versus 10 percent previously) now say that they use the cloud after an additional security solution has been purchased.

However, these customized or third-party security solutions – mash-ups developed in-house, application integration, and encryption tools – can significantly impair the functionality of the cloud application.

Consequently, the public cloud still presents serious issues for many organizations, including data privacy demanded by regulatory compliance requirements, accepted industry standards and the organization’s own internal directives; data residency that dictates control and governance of data, including its backup and recovery; and ensuring data security from both external and internal threats.

In its March 2010 report, “Top Threats to Cloud Computing,” the Cloud Security Alliance highlighted common cloud-computing threats, including shared-technology issues, data loss or leakage, and account or service hijacking. It’s these threats to sensitive data that cause C-level decision makers to block adoption of SaaS applications.

The challenge for most organizations is to take the robust governance that typically already exists for enterprise-sensitive data behind the firewall and transfer this to the cloud.

“While IT departments can set and manage policies regarding platforms and infrastructure, regulatory compliance means the top-level executives must take responsibility for their data protection,” said Terry Woloszyn, founder and CTO of PerspecSys. “PerspecSys allows the enterprise to apply their current data compliance standards and procedures to sensitive cloud data as well.”

AN APPROACH THAT DOESN’T SACRIFICE FUNCTIONALITY FOR SECURITY

PerspecSys has eliminated the security-functionality paradox of the cloud with its Privacy, Residency and Security data governance platform, the PRS Server.

The PRS Server addresses the current concerns surrounding cloud adoption, namely the ceding to the cloud provider of control over private and sensitive data such as company secrets, personally identifiable data such as customer records, and other commercially sensitive information. PerspecSys allows the company to retain the control over sensitive data, thereby mitigating the emerging threats to cloud applications, and remaining compliant with regulatory and standards requirements.

“We sincerely believe SaaS in the public cloud is the future,” said Campbell. “But without a platform that can maintain the integrity of the value proposition and the functionality of applications in the public cloud while mitigating their inherent privacy, data residency and cloud security concerns, widespread adoption simply will not happen.”

The PRS Server has an available plug-in for Salesforce.com, the most widely adopted SaaS platform. PerspecSys plans to apply the same principles to other cloud applications in additional plug-ins to be released.

Source: www.prnewswire.com

SAP’s Business ByDesign (BYD) will be released at the end of July, marking the company’s next steps into the world of subscription services for enterprise customers.

It certainly is a small step into the SaaS world for SAP. And it has been a long time in coming for the company.

But it’s a start even though you hear many analysts scoff at the suggestion that SAP is showing any cohesive approach around cloud computing and its product offerings.

It’s symbolic of a general sentiment we encountered at SAP Sapphire Now. You sense that the company needs to find its bearings and develop a cohesiveness around its product strategy.

Though we know that BYD has its skeptics, we found the presentation of the user interface to be on par with major SaaS services. It also has the underlying infrastructure to make it a viable service for companies to extend the service in the manner they wish.

SAP’s Peter Lorenz showed us the service at Sapphire Now and how it performs on the iPad.

BYD is elegant on the iPad.

It’s a corporate directive to instill beauty into sophisticated, real-time SAP products. BYD uses Silverlight fro its front end display. It is decoupled from the back end system. It means that BYD can have one model rendered to different platforms. It’s pretty cool.

API’s and OpenSocial

BYD connects to Google’s OpenSocial. It uses API’s that makes BYD a framework that customers can build upon.

In that sense, the BYD platform provide the capability to collaborate and perform transactional functions. Data for a customer can be mixed and edited between parties and then generated into a proposal.

That kind of combined capability could be powerful for small and medium sized businesses. Most smaller companies would prefer not to have an IT department. With BYD they can do the work to keep the company running without the concern about maintaining the technology on its own hardware.

That’s a compelling opportunity for the small and medium sized business. A service like BYD gives these smaller companies real-time capabilities, mobility and the option of paying on a subscription basis, starting at $149 per month, per user.

That’s the promise of BYD. Now the only question is how fast the service will be adopted and how this model is realized across the wide breadth of SAP technologies.

Source

BMC Software is planning to offer more versions of its software in the SaaS (software as a service) model in the next 12 months, as it is seeing growing customer demand for these services, an executive of the company said on Friday.

In January, BMC said that its Remedy IT Service Management (ITSM) Suite would be available to customers in a SaaS form. The company also tied up in November last year with enterprise cloud computing company, Salesforce.com to host and offer BMC Service Desk Express, a service desk application. Salesforce.com is offering the software from its Force.com cloud computing platform.

Some of the new SaaS services will be offered through Salesforce.com, while others will be offered directly by the company, said Paul Avenant , senior vice president of products and strategy for Enterprise Service Management at BMC.

The tie-up with Salesforce.com has given BMC access to a larger number of new customers, Avenant said.

Avenant did not disclose which other products would be offered by the company on a SaaS model.

A sub-set of new customers and its current customer base want to buy their software in a SaaS model, and BMC wants to be ready for this opportunity, he said.

A number of BMC’s service-provider partners already deliver SaaS services around its software, Avenant said. While some of them will continue to offer their services, others have decided to resell BMC’s own SaaS offerings and wrap other services around these offerings, he added.

BMC also sees a business opportunity from telecommunications service providers who are moving fast to offer SaaS services to increase their revenues. “They are trying to set up a new business to drive new revenue, and they are trying to get there first”, Avenant said.

Source: www.pcworld.com

Zendesk, a SaaS help desk solution, has reached a milestone: the company now has more than 5,000 customers using its platform. Launched in 2008, Zendesk offers a web-based, SaaS-delivered help desk / support ticketing solution that gives companies a simple, cost-effective way to manage incoming support requests from end customers.

Over the past two years, the startup has managed to gain an impressive client list, including Groupon, Twitter, Yammer, Sony Music, TriptIt, Lonely Planet, Foursquare and MSNBC. And Zendesk is adding around 20 new customers per day, says CEO Mikkel Svane. In total, Zendesk’s customers have dealt with over 10 million end users.

Zendesk is also rolling out new and improved community support and knowledge base features that will make it easier for users to create online communities where their customers can chime in with feedback, suggestions, and helpful information about the company or product. Zendesk’s price ranges from $9 to $59 per support agent per month, after a one-month free trial.

The company just raised $6 million in series B funding from Benchmark Capital and Charles River Ventures.

Source

Distributed Computing Power Delivers Better Web Site Experience for Consumers, Greater Productivity for Marketers, and Higher Reliability for Businesses

Unica Marketing Innovation Summit — Unica Corporation /quotes/comstock/15*!unca/quotes/nls/unca (UNCA 10.66, -0.27, -2.47%) , the recognized leader in marketing software solutions, today announced significant advancements in its software-as-a-service (SaaS) architecture that powers the Unica OnDemand product line. This innovative architecture makes maximum use of cloud computing and content delivery network resources to improve the performance, scalability, and reliability of Unica OnDemand products benefitting marketers, businesses, and consumers.

For marketers, the Unica architecture improves productivity by speeding application responsiveness. For example, application log-in from Asia is four times faster than without web application acceleration; the user experience is now the same, regardless of geography.

For businesses, Unica’s utilization of cloud computing technology delivers an even higher level of reliability and scalability — for both the delivery of personalized marketing and the collection of site performance, visitor behavior, and campaign results data.

For consumers, the Unica architecture provides a better web site experience by accelerating the delivery of personalized web site content, landing pages, and other online assets.

“Unica is an online marketing technology leader with mature, scalable, and reliable SaaS solutions,” said Eric Peterson, senior partner & Founder at independent industry analysts and consultants, Web Analytics Demystified. “By putting its product intelligence into the cloud, Unica will offer its users improved experiences and accelerated application performance.”

In related news, Unica expanded its UK-based data center to accommodate growing demand in Europe, in compliment to its multiple North American data centers.

Unica’s leading-edge SaaS infrastructure underpins the Unica OnDemand product line which includes Unica NetInsight, Unica Interactive Marketing, Unica Marketing Operations, Unica Search, and Unica Pivotal Veracity. More than 20,000 marketers rely on Unica’s on-demand software.

“The majority of technology innovation is currently focused in the areas of software-as-a-service and cloud computing. More of today’s marketers have a growing appetite for easy-to-implement, easy-to-use solutions that reduce total cost of ownership and demands on internal IT resources,” said Elana Anderson, vice president, Products, Unica. “This initiative enables us to deliver unparalleled reliability of service and will enable our products to easily scale to meet the increasing amount of customer traffic.”

About Unica Unica Corporation /quotes/comstock/15*!unca/quotes/nls/unca (UNCA 10.66, -0.27, -2.47%) is the recognized leader in marketing software solutions. Unica’s advanced set of enterprise marketing management and on-demand marketing solutions empowers organizations and individuals to turn their passion for marketing into valuable customer relationships and more profitable, timely, and measurable business outcomes. These solutions integrate and streamline all aspects of online and offline marketing. Unica’s unique interactive marketing approach incorporates customer analytics and web analytics, centralized decisioning, cross-channel execution, and integrated marketing operations. More than 1,500 organizations worldwide depend on Unica for their marketing management solutions.

Unica is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts with offices around the globe. For more information, visit www.unica.com.

www.marketwatch.com

Cloud Computing Vendors Shaping the Emerging Cloud

1) Amazon Web Services
Leading cloud pioneer Amazon offers several different in-the-cloud services. The best known is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or Amazon EC2, which allows customers to set up and access virtual servers via a simple Web interface. Fees are assessed hourly based on the number and size of virtual machines you have ($.10 -$.80 per hour), with an additional fee for data transfer.
EC2 is designed to work in conjunction with Amazon’s other cloud services, which include Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Simple DB, Cloudfront, Simple Queue Service (SQS), and Elastic MapReduce.
Notable: The Amazon Web Services list of partners is high profile, including the likes of Citrix, Facebook, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, and others.

2) Google
Yes, they own search – and are working on owning the cloud. With Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Picasa in its lineup, Google offers some of the best known cloud computing services available. They also offer some lesser known cloud services targeted primarily at enterprises, such as Google Sites, Google Gadgets, Google Video, and most notably, the Google Apps Engine. The Apps Engine allows developers to write applications to run on Google’s servers while accessing data that resides in the Google cloud as well as data that resides behind the corporate firewall. While it has been criticized for limited programming language support, the Apps Engine debuted Java and Ajax support in April, which may make it more appealing to developers.
Notable: Google recently revealed its philosophy of cloud computing in this Enterprise Blog post written by senior project manager Rajen Sheth: “As companies weigh private data centers vs. scalable clouds, they should ask a simple question: can I find the same economics, ease of maintenance, and pace of innovation that is inherent in the cloud?”

3) IBM

Although it was somewhat late to the cloud computing party, IBM launched its “Smart Business” lineup of cloud-based products and services in June. For now, the company is focusing on two key areas: software development and testing, and virtual desktops. But the company makes it clear that the cloud model has much wider-reaching implications, noting that “cloud computing represents a true paradigm shift in the way IT and IT-enabled services are delivered and consumed by businesses.” The company has also made noises about partnering with Google – the two companies would be a potent duo in the cloud sector.
Notable: A big part of IBM’s advantage in the cloud is the remarkable reach of its international presence. Early customers of IBM’s cloud computing offerings include South Africa’s Nedbank and China’s Sinochem.

4.) Microsoft

It’s a critical question facing the tech industry: Can Microsoft, the king of the traditional world of packaged software, leverage its hulking muscle to grab a similar position in the cloud world? The answer is unclear but Microsoft is certainly trying. The software giant’s ambitious Azure initiative has a solution for every Microsoft constituency, from ISVs to Web developers to enterprise clients to consumers. Formally unveiled in 2008, Azure is still very much a work in progress. If it succeeds as Microsoft hopes, in future years we’ll be talking about “Windows Azure,” a cloud-based OS that offers remote computing power, storage and management services. To make the dream come true, Microsoft is investing a king’s fortune in a network of $500 million, 500,000-square-feet datacenters around the country. The facilities will presumably form the physical backbone of the cloud network. If all goes according to plan, Microsoft will not only control the software but also the physical infrastructure that delivers that software. In other words, the company is attempting to be even bigger than it is now. (No one ever accused Redmond of being modest.) Perhaps the company’s ace in the hole: it understands enterprise management – a critical building block – more than its top competitors.
Notable: In a March 2009 interview with the New York Times, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer jumped up and drew a diagram on a white board of the company’s cloud computing plans. It’s a squiggly, complicated drawing, leading the reporter to ask if the plan wasn’t overly complex. Not at all, Ballmer explained, detailing how current flagship Windows Server will be replaced by Windows Azure. In a quote that suggests that Microsoft is very attuned to the cloud trend, he told the Times: ““Anything that has been a server needs to be a service.”

5) Salesforce.com

More than 59,000 companies use Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud solutions for customer relationship management, which has helped make it one of the most well-known and most successful cloud computing companies. In addition, through Force.com, it allows developers to use the Salesforce.com platform to develop their own applications. Users can also purchase access to the Force.com cloud infrastructure to deploy their applications.
Notable: In its 10-year history, Salesforce.com has amassed an amazing lineup of awards. Its impressive client roster includes Dell, Dow Jones Newswires, Kaiser Permanente, and SunTrust Banks. Perhaps more impressive: even in the recession the company reported stellar financial results.