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This is my favorite time of the year: budget time. At my company we look at all the wonderful ways to spend money on communicating with prospects and customers. Working for a small company, we take every dime we spend very seriously. Last year, we attended five conferences. As we plan this year's budget, we are asking the hard questions about whether sponsoring conferences is really worth it.

These are reflections from having spent a few days at the annual Salesforce.com event, Dreamforce. We hope they are valuable to people who need an executive summary-level understanding of the company and its position in the cloud and SaaS marketplace. Full disclosure, the company paid for my flight and hotel to attend Dreamforce.

Salesforce.com was founded less than 10 years ago, in March 1999. This is hard to remember when you walk into the Dreamforce event at the Moscone and see all the companies, both large and small, proclaiming that they are part of their ecosystem. Salesforce.com, more than any other company, can claim to have popularized the SaaS concept with their catchy "No Software" logo. Today they are announcing their next step forward.

During the PC era, the technology stack was controlled by Microsoft Windows and Wintel - the "Wintel" era. We are now entering a new era, called variously 'Cloud' or 'SaaS' or 'Enterprise 2.0'.

In this era everything is different - the stack, the players and the potential for value creation. Let's outline the basic shape of this emerging era, in particular defining what makes up the new stack.

Recently we noted that some large enterprise software companies were calling SaaS a fad that would soon pass away. We theorized that they were doing this not because they actually believed it, but because SaaS is a fundamental threat to the old way of doing business that they dominate. In this post we look at some of the traditional enterprise vendors who are taking a different approach - embracing SaaS and competing in that market.