Cloud: SaaS comes of age

What started as a niche over a decade ago has now gone mainstream. Ian Campbell talks to a man who has been selling the concept of software-as-a-service since the beginning.

Fergus Gloster, founder of Salesforce.com: 'A confluence of communication technologies -- fixed and mobile -- and a whole range of other things have come together to accelerate the adoption of the cloud.'

As founder of Salesforce. com in Europe in 2000, Irishman Fergus Gloster can claim to be one of the first purveyors of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and better qualified than most to talk about its evolution. He remembers the pre-cloud world, where the talk was of on-demand and utility computing as software companies struggled to come up with something as compelling as Salesforce. What was the problem?

"They were trying to find better ways to ...