Top Ten Companies Harnessing "The Wisdom Of The Clouds"

by Ron Callari

8- Netsuite

Netsuite is a business software suite including e-commerce, CRM, accounting and ERP tools.

One of the industry's most successful online business software providers, NetSuite has a tendency to make competitive moves that are both entertaining and potentially profitable for customers. NetSuite recently promised 50% discounts to Sage Software customers who switch to NetSuite, and made a similar offer to Salesforce.com and SAP customers last year. It will even integrate with rivals' technology, for example by connecting its ERP suite to Salesforce's CRM tools (see Salesforce #10 on this list ), a move designed to lure Salesforce customers by enabling new business processes.

9- Rackspace

The Rackspace Cloud, also known as "Mosso," consists of three major services: Cloud sites, a platform for building Web sites; Cloud Files, a storage service; and Cloud Servers, an Amazon EC2-like service that provides access to virtualized server instances.

Rackspace has a long history of offering hosted data center services and is a trusted name in the enterprise. With Mosso, Rackspace is taking aim at the platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service markets, the two key areas for customers looking to build Web-hosted applications.

10- Salesforce

Salesforce.com is a set of CRM tools including salesforce automation, analytics, marketing and social networking tools. A second major offering is Force.com, a platform for building Web applications and hosting them on the Salesforce infrastructure.

Salesforce.com helped pioneer the software-as-a-service market, which has now been lumped into the umbrella term "cloud computing." With Force.com, Salesforce is moving beyond SaaS into the platform-as-a-service market, which could revolutionize the way businesses build and deliver applications to end users and customers.

For those that are still having a hard time getting your head into the clouds and around cloud computing in general, this video provides the basics of cloud computing.

So there you have our Top Ten list. Please do take our TOP TEN Companies Harnessing "The Wisdom of the Clouds" POLL and let us know which company or companies are doing the best job in the clouds. Or if you know of one that we missed, please leave a comment with the URL link.