Last Week In the Cloud: Salesforce Acquisitions and Global Cloud Growth

In the past couple of months, cloud computing has come to be lauded as a driver for U.S. jobs and economic growth. This past week, however, put the momentum of cloud adoption into a new, broader scale. In the news this week cloud service leaders like Salesforce.com begin to better bolster cloud architecture and streamline adoption and services, while cloud computing gains further growth at the global level.

The Economics of a Global Cloud

Last Monday, Forbes ran the headline, “Cloud is The World's Economic Opportunity.” The article, written by Jacqueline Vanacek, SAP’s Commissioner to the U.S. Cloud2 Commission, argues that global cloud collaboration will lead to global economic growth.

As an example, the recent National Institute of Standards’ (NIST) Cloud Computing Forum featured representatives from various global markets and strongly pointed to the global benefit of cloud growth – touching on the commonality of needs and goals across myriad markets and countries.

To give a little context for Vanacek’s article, Global Industry Analysts (GIA) released a report today that estimates the global cloud computing services market to hit $127B by 2017. As the global economy shifts from recession to recovery, GIA predicts that companies will continue to recognize the economic and operational benefits of cloud computing. Asia-Pacific was identified as the fastest growing market for cloud services, especially — and not surprisingly — China and India.

Salesforce, Acquisitions & the Social Cloud

The latest in a wave of acquisitions: Salesforce last week picked up Model Metrics, a consulting startup that helps enterprises adopt the cloud through, primarily, mobile and social cloud services. Earlier this year, Salesforce made two other social cloud acquisitions, Assistly and Radian6, extending social media and customer interaction monitoring across Salesforce’s platform.

Considering how many businesses rely on Salesforce for their CRM — and innumerable other services built on Force.com, everything form ERP to service automation — enterprises are managing more cloud apps than ever before. Salesforce will only become more powerful as the company builds out the platform. What does this mean for the cloud? More adoption, more apps and a greater need to manage employee access and identity.