SAAS Cloud Confusion

Lost in the religious debate surrounding the cloud-- is it salesforce.com, is it Google, is it Azure, is it all of the above?--is the discussion that matters most:  how do companies effectively improve their business process?  That, in my mind, is all that matters.  Go back to notecards and filofaxes if it'll deliver incremental and sustainable value (which, of course, it probably won't.)

With the emergence of a real dominant player--a.k.a. salesforce.com--that can be trusted and has the scale to handle enterprise transactions, enterprise accounts, and enterprise headaches, comes a whole bevy of vendors that are pretenders and that will get themselves in trouble by overpromising and underdelivering.  Many of these vendors are fueled with VC money that is running dry.  And many are filling niches which will prove too small to build sustainable businesses.

Every company that is evaluating the cloud and SAAS vendors should put their plans through a "Cloud Litmus Test."  Here is a link to a presentation that I gave at Dreamforce that  describes just how to do this http://everydayceo.blogspot.com/2009/03/is-crm-dead.html.