The year of the Cloud has come to a climax at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco where over 30,000 registrants converged to celebrate the rapidly expanding world of ‘on-demand’ solutions and collaboration tools.

Salesforce.com used the event to beat back the recent efforts of Oracle and Microsoft to gain a share of the Cloud Computing market with a new round of initiatives aimed at building on its phenomenal momentum and success.

The two most significant announcements on Day One were Salesforce.com’s offer of free Chatter accounts across its customer base along with a public version of the social networking service in February, and a new Database.com offering as a spin out of its Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

Day Two began with the news that Salesforce.com plans to acquire the Open Source oriented, Ruby-based application development platform, Heroku, for $212 million in cash. Salesforce.com and BMC Software also announced that … Read More »