8 Cloud Lessons

With 10 years and 87,000 clients behind them, Salesforce.com is a safe bet — and not just in the CRM category. They've been increasing the size of their footprint within large clients, moving then beyond single business units or functional organizations. This self-confidence is echoed by all the pure-play cloud vendors, of which there were several dozen on the show floor. Though some of them are small companies, none of them has to explain why a cloud architecture is OK for business.

In comparison to previous U.S. shows from cloud vendors, I'm hearing a lot more foreign accents at Dreamforce that I would even in taking everything into consideration polyglot San Francisco. Cloud computing is getting a lot more international use, and not just from end-clients. The Internet has no borders, and a lot more vendors — software and services — are popping up in India, Israel, and Asia. In the cloud, it doesn't matter where your developers work any more than it does where your clients are.

Of course, it's however early days. Now the client for many cloud apps sure looks to be a personal device — an Android or an iPad — and on those devices there will be dedicated apps. It might be impolitic to point out that this is the rebirth of the thick client, yet the screen size and intermittent connectivity of these devices means that the browser will be the less-interesting UI for mobile cloud apps. And practically every cloud vendor is focused on mobility however.

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