As early as 2008, Bullhorn Inc., a fast growing Boston-based provider of front-office staffing and recruiting management software, was considering the cloud to help streamline development and distribution of its Software as a Service (SaaS) products to over 2,500 customers and 25,000 users in 35 countries.

Any corporate application developer hoping to make the journey to the cloud with the help of a Platform as a Service implementation is wise to listen to those who have already ventured down that path.

While there are sure to be a lot of new networking and IT companies that emerge in 2012, these nine stood out to us for their potential to deliver game-changing innovations in a wide array of fields, including cloud computing, enterprise search and mobile application development.

Java platform-as-a-service cloud provider CloudBees has launched a commercial version of the Jenkins CI (continuous integration) platform, the company announced Wednesday.

While there are sure to be a lot of new networking and IT companies that emerge in 2012, these nine stood out for their potential to deliver game-changing innovations in a wide array of fields, including Cloud computing, enterprise search, and mobile application development. (These are in addition to seven hot Cloud companies and seven storage companies to watch that we highlighted last year.)