Capacity Crowd

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff welcomed an estimated 18,000 attendees to Dreamforce 2009 in San Francisco last week. Originally the company expected some 12,000 attendees. Benioff said the huge turnout is a sign of how quickly cloud computing is catching on. "Cloud computing has been a huge shift for the industry," Benioff told the assembled crowd.

That shift has been good for Salesforce as well. Just before the start of Dreamforce, the company said sales in its third quarter ended Oct. 31 increased 20 percent to $330.5 million from $276.5 million from the same period one year earlier.

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