Today I attended the Tour de Force — a Salesforce promotional event that introduces the “platform” as a service solution. The Cloud Computing space is loaded with vendors — and I am willing to bet my house that this is the real deal — what people will call Web 3.0 — and make web 2.0 look very small. I told you that I drank the kool-aid!

Essentially, this solution allows you to quickly develop enterprise level software using the shared “cloud” resources of salesforce’s infrastructure. Cloud computing is when the datacenter becomes virtualized, and servers are no longer thought of as unique entities, but an array of systems that function together and offer all the foundation services (infrastructure, billing, security, content, database functions, etc.) you need to build an online software service. Now, developers will have an integrated platform to build, test, and deploy applications — with shared code and resources the benefits are immense. This really lowers the barrier to entry for software — and from a business perspective enables what I call the “short tail” — where your business solution can be offered to any size business in any market. When you have an Amazon or Google or Salesforce infrastructure behind you, you can scale ad infinitum. Or sell to one. Revolutionary.

Here’s an image from Peter Laird’s blog that provides a great landscape of what is going on.