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Enterprise adoption of cloud computing, SaaS, and social media (whatever you want to call it) is accelerating. This is a healthy market, in which vendors are doing well in a tough economy. As we near the end of a year that will go down in history with the words "meltdown," "panic," "crisis," and "depression" attached, it is time to celebrate the winners in this market, enterprise-focused web products that are already doing well and poised for even greater success in 2009. And if these products excite you, we invite you to subscribe to the ReadWriteWeb Enterprise Channel.

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.

Yesterday, an all-star panel at the TechWeb/O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Summit took a closer look at the implications of the current shift towards cloud computing and discussed the possible business models around it. The panel featured Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch, Salesfore.com's CEO Marc Benioff, Google's Dave Girouard, and VMware's CEO Paul Maritz. The panel was moderated by Tim O'Reilly.

At big events, PR likes to put out some info prior to the event under embargo, but save something exciting for the Keynote. Well I guess that was Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, joining Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com CEO, up on stage to announce their partnership. Facebook sent Sheryl Sandberg, not Mark Zuckerberg, as this was a business crowd with more Blackberries than iPhones and plenty of ties.

It was a big party. Amazon and Google were also invited. The message - all aligned with Salesforce.com in their quest to be the dominant Cloud Computing platform for business.

When Google launched its Visualization API in March, it only allowed developers to create applications on top of spreadsheets in Google Docs. Starting today, developers can also use the API to create graphs and gadgets from any data source connected to the web, including SQL databases and Excel spreadsheets. The Visualization API gives developers the ability to build gadgets, using a set of over 40 different types of visualizations, ranging from interactive bar charts and timelines, to maps and gauges.

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.

This afternoon at Structure 08 an interesting discussion was had about the birth, growth, trials and tribulations of Salesforce.com. Om Malik from GigaOm was joined by Michael Copeland from Fortune Magazine and Parker Harris from Salesforce.com. While the 'fireside chat' was titled The Endgame for Boxed Software?, the focus was on what lessons can be learned from the venerable CRM vendor.

I have been a total skeptic on proprietary messaging within social networks. After all, who on earth would want a proprietary tool when e-mail reaches everybody? I love it, though, when circumstances change a deeply ingrained opinion. The technology business has a way of doing that. You've likely heard the expression, "I live in Outlook." Well I used to. Now I hop rather awkwardly between Outlook and Gmail. Could I soon live in LinkedIn? Could you?