The Daily Cloud: Did Salesforce.com just become the biggest cloud computing company ever?

Salesforce.com boasts about the size of its wallet
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said his Software as a Service (SaaS) firm had earned $1.3 billion in revenue to become "the first enterprise cloud computing company to reach this scale."

Speaking on its Q4 earning call, Benioff said business was booming for Salesforce.com "despite a year that most software companies would like to forget," with 21% growth in revenue over last year and a 31% growth in customers, to a whopping 72,500.

He chalked the rosy scenario up to the maturation of cloud computing as an idea and boasted of "a huge series of wins" against Oracle, Microsoft and SAP. Those eminent entities, however, might dispute what constitutes a win, since when we last checked they seemed to being doing just fine.

So is Salesforce.com now the biggest cloud computing company ever? It could be the biggest independent CRM SaaS provider out there, but to keep things in perspective, $1.3 billion in revenue is a fair-to-middling sized business division at IBM.

More research indicates that people are into the cloud
New research from TheInfoPro said that 60% of enterprises are either already using cloud computing infrastructure services or have definite plans to do so. Surprising no one, data security was a major concern, with three quarters of the survey participants being "very concerned or extremely concerned about security in a cloud environment." According to the study, however, that's not going to stop them from spending money on cloud this year, so security pros will have to figure it out on the fly (which will also surprise no one).

If you like free, you'll like Abiquo
Now the third major open source cloud infrastructure platform in the wild after Eucalyptus and OpenECP (formerly Enomaly), the darling little open source cloud computing project known as Abiquo has officially opened its doors with abiCloud ver. 1.0.0. Abiquo's offering is a Web-based software package designed to turn your data center into a cloud. It is slick, wide open, standards friendly, and it's free. Give it a spin, as SearchCloudComputing.com heartily endorses things that are free.