Ibm up in the Clouds (Mortech Musings) (Column‪)‬

The idea for this column took shape while I was attending San Francisco-based Salesforce.com Inc.'s "Dreamforce Global Gathering 2009" meeting. The meeting brought together 16,000 users and developers of applications that reside in the Sales-force.com computing "cloud." From among the minions of 16,000 were brought roughly 135,000 applications running on the company's Force.com platform. (Rapid rollout of business applications is a major attraction of cloud computing.) I am describing a conference held by one company, not by an industry. Given that the United States is in recession and not carried along by an economic expansion, the numbers of Dreamforce attendees and the number of Dreamforce applications are nearly unfathomable.