There are still sceptics, but the business world seems to be increasingly convinced by Salesforce.com's cloud computing model, writes IAN CAMPBELL

AFTER TWO hours of listening to Salesforce.com’s chief executive evangelise about the future of technology, you want to move your wife and kids to the cloud, never mind your IT business systems.

The company’s Dreamforce event in San Francisco last week was like an evangelical meeting where Marc Benioff praised believers and castigated non-converts to the latest instalment in his 10-year crusade to kill off software. He is selling the idea that offsite “cloud” platforms accessed via the internet provide a simple and less expensive way of running and developing business technology.

The argument has grown more convincing over time, with Microsoft, Amazon and Google pursuing similar models for developing applications in the cloud and delivering software as a service online. “It is a fresh and exciting way to break out of old models,” said Benioff.

Joining him on stage were big names from the industry who shared his enthusiasm, although not always his belief that the cloud was the only place to be.

John Swainson is chief executive of CA, a company that makes IT management solutions and has a vested interest in onsite infrastructure, but he was there because he is working with Salesforce and quite happy to have a foot in both camps.

“There will still be a lot of software in the world; it will persist, but now there is a new way of developing applications that will coexist,” he said. “Big customers will have a mixed environment.”

With 33 years of working in the IT industry, Swainson had a clear message to sceptics who thought the cloud was a fad: “The change we’re going through is as profound as anything we’ve seen.”

He said it was shifting the economics of the industry and that business technology would never be the same.

David Girouard, president of Google Enterprise, was a less surprising advocate for the cloud. More than two million companies use Google’s web-based software, with applications such as Google Docs and Gmail starting to threaten the dominance of Microsoft’s licence-based software.

Girouard conceded that the cloud was still not perfect and it was early days, but said there was real momentum. “A great signal is that the old school has jumped on board. It’s an indicator that we have arrived,” he said, alluding to Microsoft making its software available as a service and building the Azure development platform.

Having created a platform for software as a service with its sales-automation customer relationship management (CRM) product, Salesforce now hosts other applications and application development on its Force.com platform, prompting Forbes to describe the company as the iTunes of business software.

To date, Force has facilitated 135,000 custom applications built by more than 200,000 developers. The company claims the application development is four to five times faster and half the cost of the traditional on-premises approach.

In a report sponsored by Salesforce, industry analyst IDC compiled a list of reasons why the cloud is better than onsite models.

Having spoken to 10 Salesforce customers, it supported the claim that the Force platform helped organisations build better-quality applications faster at a lower cost. These benefits, combined with better application performance, saved each firm $3.9 million (€2.6 million) in annual revenue.

IDC said cloud computing was a major milestone in IT, alongside the commercialisation of the web in the 1990s and the advent of Java in 1995. It predicted that business applications as a service would be the fastest-growing part of cloud-based services.

Organisations with new business models, unencumbered by old assets they want to sweat out, seem to have the most to gain from the Salesforce platform. More than 10,000 websites have been built on Force and it is a thriving e-commerce platform that handles 220 million transactions daily.

A number of customers at the Dreamforce event explained how they were able to develop end-to-end business solutions, extending far beyond the sales automation solution for which Salesforce is famous.

BMC, an IT service desk solutions company, has built a product for “customers that care about services, not servers”. BMC chief executive Bob Beauchamp said it took just two months to come up with a solution that would offer more affordable service desk support for companies that might previously have been put off by the cost and complexity of traditional software.

Narinder Singh, chief executive of Appirio, a cloud implementation partner, stressed that Force was not just about applications adjacent to CRM. He said it served people and projects better than inventory and assets, the hotspot for traditional business software.

To entice customers on board, Salesforce allows organisations to build their first application for free and deploy it to up to 100 users in the hopes that its success will persuade them to upgrade to a paid subscription.