One such witness bearing testimony was Dan Marionni, vice president at Morgan Stanley, which has been a Salesforce.com customer since 2006 and has used the platform to create an application to its 500 branch managers recruit new financial advisors. "We needed a platform to give managers a way to manage all recruiting activities, to easily forecast who's coming in and when," Marionni said. His group built some custom objects and used some native Salesforce objects. Marionni said the firm has brought in 20 different business groups to use the new recruiting software and may also use Salesforce in other parts of the firm. In short, Morgan is hardly betting the bank on cloud computing at this point, but this is a start. Other speakers showed accounting software and movie theater monitoring software built on Salesforce's platform.

One thing became clear to me during the event. For all its focus on Google, Microsoft has a formidable opponent in Salesforce. At one point during his presentation, Benioff said, "We've all been paying too much for office productivity" and that with the integration of Salesforce and Google tools (which was announced Monday) business people can get a complete suite of office productivity tools (email, document sharing, spreadsheets, etc.) for $10 per user per month. He later showed a slide packed with various Microsoft server and software icons, with .net at the top, and said this type of software model "is a terrible idea and a very Western idea -- it's not good for emerging markets, they can't afford it."

The way I see it, while it will probably take several years at least for Wall Street firms to start building and hosting mission-critical applications on Salesforce's cloud -- there are too many security and privacy concerns for fast adoption -- there's no reason why Google and Salesforce couldn't carry away the market for many smaller, generic business tools, such as recruiting applications, time-off applications, and even word processing and spreadsheets, with their cloud computing model, which lets developers combine software components made by others with their own portions of code.