SaaS / Cloud Computing
Jinfo Blog

27th February 2009

By Udo Hohlfeld

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Salesforce.com reported financial results for its fourth quarter of fiscal year 2009 and total fiscal year 2009 (February 2008 through Jauary 2009) on February 25th. Ok, what did they show? Again a record quarter, again impressive growth rates across all KPIs: - total revenue for the fourth quarter was $289.6 million which exceeded analysts’ estimates by $4.7 million - total revenue for the complete fiscal year 2009 rocketed to $1.077 billion, which was inline with analysts' expectations - their customer base grew by 3,600 to a total of 55,400 with more than 1.5 million net subscribers There are much more milestones the company achieved in the past twelve months - but actually, the business success shows something much more important: our future will definitely be "cloudy" and cloud computing finally has arrived in the enterprise. Not only masses of startups provide access to cloud-based servcies, but also traditional industry heavyweights engage in SaaS / cloud computing: Sun just started its cloud initiative; IBM operates the "Blue Platform"; Amazon provides cloud services via its subsidiary AWS (Amazon Web Services); Google is an important player; Microsoft previews Azure, Live Mesh and already offers cloud-based servcies to small and medium enterprises; SAP just acquired Coghead, a platform provider; ..... you can extend this list almost infinitely. Salesforce.com and its success story that started about a decade ago are not the center of gravity of SaaS / cloud computing, but they are the proof point that validates the business model and the value proposition of the cloud to all of us. Web 2.0 is the DIY web - everybody can create content, but it is also the DIY web because it provides the computing power to drive innovative start-ups and anyone to create applications that change the world. Sources: (excerpt) http://www.salesforce.com http://www.sun.com http://www.ibm.com http://www.microsoft.com http://www.sap.com http://www.google.com ...

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