A01 chaf6542 06 se fm indd

applications service providers

’ (ASP).

Figure 3.8 shows one of the largest SaaS or utility providers, Salesforce.com, where cus-

tomers pay on a per user per month basis according to the facilities used. The service is 

delivered from the Salesforce.com servers to over 50,000 customers in 15 local languages. 

Salesforce has added new services through acquisition of other SaaS providers. For example, 

to create its Marketing Cloud application it acquired social media monitoring tool Radian6 in 

March 2011for $326 million, advertising service Buddy Media in May 2012 for US$689 mil-

lion and email marketing service ExactTarget in June 2013 for US$2.5 billion.

Cloud computing

In descriptions of web services you will often hear, confusingly, that they access ‘the cloud’, 

or you may come across the term ‘

cloud computing

’. The cloud referred to is the combina-

tion of networking and data storage hardware and software hosted externally to a company, 

typically shared between many separate or ‘distributed’ servers accessed via the Internet. So, 

for example, Google Docs will be stored somewhere ‘in the cloud’ without any knowledge of 

where it is or how it is managed since Google stores data on many servers. Of course you can 

access the document from any location. But there are issues to consider about data stored and 

served from the cloud: ‘Is it secure, is it backed up, is it always available?’ The size of Google’s 

cloud is indicated by Pandia (2007), which estimated that Google had over 1 million servers 

running the  open-  source Linux software. No more recent official figures are available, but 

Google has been open about individual data centres. In March 2009, it purchased the Summa 

Mill from Finnish paper company Stora Enso and converted the 60- year-  old paper mill into 

a data centre after investing an initial €200 million. More than 2,000 individuals working for 

50 companies (mostly Finnish and from the local area) contributed to the project. One of the 

server rooms is featured in Figure 3.9.