SAS, NetSuite, Salesforce.com Announce Cloud Computing EffortsSAS, NetSuite, Salesforce.com Announce Cloud Computing Efforts

In three separate announcements, software vendors SAS Institute, NetSuite, and Salesforce.com show they have deepened their commitments to cloud computing.

SAS Institute announced Thursday plans to build a $70 million, 38,000-square-foot cloud computing facility to support expansion of its OnDemand software-as-a-service offerings.

SAS already offers OnDemand in a dozen areas, including education, marketing optimization, anti-money laundering, business intelligence, and Web analytics.

The facility, to be built on SAS's large, wooded campus in Cary, N.C., will include two 10,000-square-foot server farms and will be operating by mid-2010, said SAS. The building will meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards for water and energy conservation.

SAS is building the facility to meet the "growing demand by our customers for hosted solutions," CEO Jim Goodnight said in a statement. Indeed, statistical analysis and business intelligence software can be costly -- a SaaS model may be particularly attractive to companies and organizations using those types of apps.

NetSuite, meanwhile, announced Thursday the SuiteCloud ecosystem, a platform-as-a-service offering similar to Salesforce's Force.com platform. It includes a developers' network, a developer program for those building add-ons and apps complementary to NetSuite, and a SaaS marketplace for posting those apps.

Critics of Force.com have noted that it requires developers to learn Salesforce's proprietary technologies. NetSuite's SuiteCloud is also proprietary: Participating developers would build apps using the NetSuite Business Operating System development environment.

But the availability of such an app marketplace is clearly beneficial to NetSuite customers, giving them access to SaaS-based vertical applications or add-ons that they might otherwise have to build themselves. Partners that have built SaaS apps for NetSuite customers, using NetSuite's development environment, include Five9 (call centers), SuccessFactors (employee performance management), and Marketo (marketing automation).

NetSuite said its SuiteCloud can help emerging SaaS companies get off the ground. RootStock, which launched a SaaS for manufacturers in 2008, said it got access to customers through NetSuite's reseller channel.

Salesforce, meanwhile, announced Thursday that it's now offering subscription-based training programs for its customers to extend training to employees that are using Salesforce CRM and other types of business applications running on the Force.com platform.

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