Salesforce.com continues to ramp up its cloud offering and bolster its position as a leading business applications provider for companies of all sizes. News is now out that later this month there will be a big announcement from SFDC and VMware of a joint product announcement – you can even see the mock up landing page created here .

Now I am going out on a limb here, but I expect a lot to be made of this partnership as SalesForce.com and VMware bring two big trends together to offer clients scalable applications and infrastructure environments – perhaps being one of the first to link Software as a Service (SaaS) with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). What does this mean?

Well given the growth of virtualization (take and assessment here)  in corporate data centres and an increase in the usage of  web-based software to meet employee and business needs these two technologies have a natural fit. From the ability to support growing server needs to an ability to dynamically apportion computing, application and processing resources needed for spikes in business demand (say a large payroll run to the opening of a new store and IT needs for adding people, processes and applications based on projected not real commerce) companies may flock in droves to an offering like this with pretty clear ROI and limited risk.

Build on top of this the growing application platform that SFDC brings with AppExchange and ChatterExchange and real-time application deployment, messaging and even management of both physical and web-based resources becomes readily available to businesses big and small.

Granted this is all speculation – but I’ll definitely be updating this blog in few weeks when the cat is out of the bag.

Related posts:

1. ERP Software-as-a-Service: Choosing the Duck versus the Chicken
2. Open Services Infrastructure