General acceptance of cloud computing is, for some of us, one of the most exciting advances  in recent technological history. In some ways it’s reminiscent of the mainstream evolution of the Internet. In the mid-nineties, as an up and coming software developer in The Silicon Valley, I was an early adopter of the Internet. I embraced the Internet for my personal use, but more importantly, I embraced the Internet professionally. I enjoyed these early days working in a small universe of developers creating the first wave of Windows based web server applications.

Then, as now, the debates were both passionate and divisive. In fact, I remember debating the viability of the Internet (as an application delivery platform) with my late father. He argued that mainstream availability of high speed access would indefinitely stifle mainstream acceptance (beyond static HTML). Fortunately, he came around to my way of thinking and those of us that invested the time in Internet technology in the early days were well prepared for the revolution that occurred in the new Millennium.

For me, acceptance of cloud computing started almost four years ago, while I was still working for LexisNexis. I was extremely passionate about a product (Total Practice Advantage) that we were developing that integrated online content with Time Matters. The product integrated live, dynamic content within Time Matters, in real-time. Our users could perform document automation, implement practice guides and perform legal research, in context of the case data in Time Matters using mostly online content. This hybrid implementation of the desktop application and online content has ultimately proved very successful for Apple with iTunes.

My passion to continue pursuing the ultimate ubiquitous climate for business work-flow and information retrieval survives to this day. For me and many others, the “to cloud or not to cloud” decision has been made. Now that the mainstream has begun to warm up to cloud technology I think we are ready to see new levels of adoption in the legal community, especially for technologies built on the number one cloud computing platform in the industry. Read on to see….

What company is:

• Ranked #55 on Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For?
• Ranked #3 on Forbes 25 Fastest Growing Tech Companies?
• Ranked #5 on the Information Week 500, Most Innovative Business Technology Organizations?

What company has:

• A Market Cap of 9.5 Billion?
• An Annual Revenue of 1.3 Billion?
• Year Over Year Revenue Growth of 22%?
• Year Over Year Customer Growth of 31%?
• Based on information available Q1 2010?

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What company: Enjoys 94% customer satisfaction rate to the extent they plan to continue using the solution and would recommend it to colleagues? (Independent research firm CustomerSat)

What platform:

• Offers security, certified at the workstation level, application level, facility level and network level?
• Can offer reliability, running within world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster recovery facilities and has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for several years?
• Delivers proven, real-time scalability and is used by many of the world’s largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec? Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed.
• Provides transparent system status allowing you to view real-time performance, availability, and security information?

• Easily delivers real time, in place upgrades and never breaks your customizations, code, or integrations? You’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements.

• Offers the best API in the industry for integrating with existing business processes, applications and external data sources?

• Has a built-in sandbox allowing you, with a single click, to create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training?

• Offers true business-to-business information exchange, allowing its users to selectively, instantly and seamlessly share data with other companies using this product?

• Runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure?

The Company is Salesforce.com, Inc. The Platform is Force.com

Each week I’ll take Force4Law readers into the heart of Salesforce.com, showing you how Law Firms can benefit from cloud computing using the Salesforce.com platform.