SAP announced a broad set of plans to become a player in cloud computing, spanning from a "loosely coupled suite" of business applications to data integration and PaaS (platform as a service) Tuesday during the Sapphire conference in Orlando.

Salesforce.com's Heroku division this week rolled out two entry-level tiers for its Postgres-based cloud database service, hoping to cater to applications with lower data-volume requirements as well as helping startup developers make an easier jump into production.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) now allows ASP.NET developers to take advantage of Elastic Beanstalk, which has been developed to make it easier to roll out cloud-based applications, the company said on Tuesday.

Infor is moving into the PaaS (platform as a service) market with an offering called Mongoose that is based on its long-standing internal IDE (integrated development environment), the company announced Monday during the Inforum conference in Denver.

The explosive success of the social networking service Pinterest wouldn't have been possible without the easy scalability of the Amazon cloud services, an executive for Pinterest said.

Software developer Christopher Shockey saw the first signs of trouble in late 2008. A sales rep who had always represented Web application development provider Coghead was now calling on behalf of Coghead's much larger rival Salesforce.com.