As many of us celebrate the beginning of the holiday season and the end of 2009, it’s a good opportunity to take a step back to see how far we’ve come as an industry in advancing cloud computing. Despite tough economic times this past year, we’ve seen that entrepreneurship and innovation still happen around significant technology and business models like cloud computing – something that may represent the most profound shift our industry has seen in decades. 

Our annual Dreamforce conference has become the de facto industry event for cloud computing and serves as an annual capstone for not only salesforce.com but our entire community of customers and partners too. If past Dreamforce events introduced cloud computing and Force.com to the world, this year’s Dreamforce showcased undeniable proof points of the cloud bringing new business and technical value to IT departments, ISVs, solution providers, and developers – at a pace and intensity unmatched by traditional software.

Companies large and small are recognizing that cloud computing and Force.com gives them both substantial agility and cost advantages – whether it’s CIOs like Yoichi Yokomizo from Lawson (the 2^nd largest convenience store chain in Japan, not Lawson Software) standardizing business processes or CEOs like James Sheppard from Vetrazzo moving their entire businesses in the cloud. Startup ISVs like Benelicious (pictured right, winner of the 2009 Force.com 40 Innovation Showcase) and Appirio are enjoying the capital-efficiency and time-to-market of Force.com and can deliver applications that are challenging larger traditional vendors. 

Even some of the largest software companies in the world are moving key product lines to Force.com and accelerating decades of domain expertise to the cloud. Solution providers are also finding new channel opportunities in cloud by reselling Force.com, shedding low-margin, client-server reseller businesses to bring the power of the cloud to their customers.

We are in the middle of a very profound shift indeed.

So as we start thinking about the new year and new opportunities, it’s time for us to focus our vision and investments. With exciting new innovations like Chatter, Salesforce.com certainly will continue to do our part in fueling this shift in 2010….and we’re looking for new partners to join us in the mission.

Happy Thanksgiving!