• According to IBM global revenue from cloud computing will jump to $126 billion in 2012 from $47 billion in 2008
• Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, recently said his company is “all in” when talking about Cloud computing
• IBM last week purchased Cast Iron, a powerful Cloud data integration provider. According to IBM: “The acquisition expands IBM’s industry-leading business process and integration software portfolio, which grew more than 20 percent in the first quarter of 2010.” This may not seem like a big deal but s/ he who controls data connectivity wins.

The Cloud delivers agility and on demand productivity. Sales always needed and continues to need up to the moment relevant information to close more deals. Opportunities happen in real-time. Responses to emerging opportunities must be swift and comprehensive in scope. Information must be accessible in the now.

Social media, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are Cloud platforms for which business benefits have not been fully realized yet. With the advent of connectors such as Salesforce.com Chatter, this may also change. Tell us what you think.

Applications served up via the cloud usually occur at much lower costs to the consumer because there is no software to buy, no licensing, or no maintenance to deal with. When used as a service most customers are billed for usage, or have a subscription as is the case with Salesforce.com, the leader in SaaS for Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Salesforce.com is able to further reduce costs by running their application on a multi-tenant architecture. What this means is they have only one copy of the application serving multiple customers. This reduces development costs by having only one application to maintain and upgrade. It also reduces server cost, because servers are not sitting around idly waiting for requests, as is the case with dedicated servers or client-server architecture.