Some great stats courtesy of Joel Bruckenstein's 2011 Tech Survey and Report

On September 18^th, 70,000 people will descend on San Francisco for Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference. For four days people from around the globe will learn how to better use the leading web based CRM system, and look for other applications and services found in the enormous ecosystem of consultants, apps and independent software vendors, like us. We'll be busy at booth 237 and connecting with our partners, but if you were one of the lucky ones to find a hotel in the city, be sure to stop by – at least for the booth swag!

"Everything we do, we do differently than we did 18 months ago. We've reengineered the entire firm to change the client experience," said John Ohmer, CEO of YellowBrickRoad Financial Advisors. "It's made portfolio reporting and financial advising completely different than anything we've ever experienced."

What John and his team did was to go boldly to a place where they had not gone before...that place is called the cloud.

Investment banking is complex enough, anyone alive in 2008 can attest to that. Now couple that with the difficulty of sharing information in a secure and compliant way across offices and firewalls. That's the situation THiNKGREEN! Global Advisors was looking at before it made its move to the cloud.

"We used to have our own server but that was pretty dicey. It was usually reliable until it wasn't. If that went down, everything went to a standstill...Now we know that all of our documents are always available and safe in NetDocuments. Our whole idea was to be entirely in the cloud to eliminate wasted resources which bodes well with our green tech push." - Asmaa Parker, banking associate.

Thousands of lawyers, accountants, financial advisors and more use NetDocuments everyday to securely manage and share their content from the cloud. Salesforce CRM users are another fast growing constituency among NetDocuments users.

In fact, NetDocuments is the most popular all-time document management system among Salesforce users.

Since 2006, when NetDocuments first released its AppExchange integration, the rich customizable platform of Salesforce and NetDocuments has allowed the applications to be tightly integrated for all types of customers, including enterprise-level organizations such as Extra Space® Storage, as well as hundreds of financial service advisory, consulting and legal firms.

Extra Space Storage's business revolves around earth-based self storage units, but that doesn't keep it from using the cloud to make its business go.

With 2,200 employees spread out at self-storage locations around the country it uses NetDocuments to manage and share all of its documents within Salesforce.com in a simple and user-friendly way.

It adds over 5,000 documents a week that are instantly made available to the corporate office in Salt Lake City as well as the majority of employees that are working in their local communities.

Remember recess in elementary? That's right, a hundred kids running at full speed in different directions, headed for unknown destinations, totally oblivious of who would be there and why? Exciting, yes. Fun, yes. Total mayhem, you bet. The Cloud Computing industry is growing at a break-neck pace, recess is out, and it's time to make some sense of the chaos.

Collaboration is a broad and well trodden topic; in fact, it was Salesforce.com's theme at their event of the year, titled "Collabor8". But just because Salesforce.com can throw around phrases like "collaborative software", or taking a "collaborative approach" in their business vernacular, it doesn't make it any easier to grasp in a real sense, nor to implement in a real-life, competitive and fast-paced environment, especially if your business has nothing to do with Salesforce.com.

There is no question as to the importance a solid CRM application plays in a firm's overall business strategy. But just having the best-of-breed CRM app doesn't mean that you've connected all the dots in the end-to-end customer experience. Having your CRM integrated at the record level with your client-specific data will enhance not only the interactions with your clients, but also aid in predictive up-selling and retention initiatives.

Part I: SaaS for Lawyers; Part II: SaaS for Financial Advisors; Part III: SaaS for Accountants

With SaaS technology, the PC can be made to serve as a global network. Today, in part 2 of a 3 part series, we will discuss how financial advisors and broker dealers can reduce hardware costs, decrease their carbon footprint, increase mobility and enable collaboration with clients while providing SEC and FINRA compliance through cloud computing and SaaS.

Post authored by Marc Duncan of the NetDocuments Sales Team

Wow, what a week and what a show. I have just returned from the Dreamoforce 09 show in San Francisco and had an amazing experience. As a member of the NetDocuments sales team I spend a lot of time "selling" the idea of SaaS, cloud computing, etc. During this day to day routine, it is easy to wonder: is this idea really catching on? On Wednesday morning during the keynote address I was assured that yes…SaaS and Cloud computing are here to stay.