While Microsoft and Amazon have been dominating the headlines of late when it comes to new cloud computing services, Salesforce.com is touting its existing accomplishments at this year's Dreamforce user and developer conference. With a series of keynotes from speakers as diverse as Michael Dell (founder of Dell Computer), Malcolm Gladwell (controversial visionary), and Neil Young (legendary rocker and owner of the very cool schooner W.N. Ragland which spent a few days anchored out next to our mooring south of Port Townsend this summer) joining chairman Marc Benioff, it's clear the the company wants to make a splash and feels due some part of the cloud computing wave emerging recently.

Nothing that Salesforce offers strictly qualifies as "cloud computing" by my own definition of the term, but they are certainly expanding the boundaries of the Software as a Service approach. The broad range of services integration from other providers, including Google's Apps and more recently Facebook and Amazon Web Services, the Force.com third-party development tools, and new offerings such as their Sites hosted website infrastructure (pre-equipped with Salesforce integration, of course, to expose what you want to from your CRM system on your public-facing website), are all second-order efforts in the deployment of SaaS technologies, which aren't being explored in a coherent manner by any other company I am familiar with. Of course, I am not all that certain that Salesforce is rolling them out coherently either, but they are certainly a lot more convincing in their scenarios than other businesses desperately announcing scattershot alliances (actually, almost everyone else announcing a partnership with Facebook recently comes to mind).

Once the dust settles, I think it will be clear that Salesforce is paving the way for what SaaS will ultimately look like... and it's a distinct vision from that of cloud computing, no matter what the marketers might want you to think. The company has become adept at leveraging the advantages in flexibility and communication that are integral to SaaS and the broader it spreads the net, the better the business for both Salesforce and their partners. The rosy, everyone-is-welcome-in-our-tent vision painted by Benioff is not shared by all potential partners, but I think that's probably within the expected range of hypocrisy for the average growing company. If Salesforce can get some press, I think their substantive advances in providing releveant, directed services right now, today, where cloud providers are still flailing to get out of beta and define their strategies will play well with CIOs looking to take advantage of online economies of scale but who have little patience for dealing with implementation learning curves right now.