Three interesting news items that Cloud computing and marketplace are just happening.

Nobody else than Salesforce – a 10-year old company running a 10B+ $ cloud business, with 60,000 customers and 1,5M users (talking about reach…) – has as helped to launch FinancialForce.com , a new company that offers financial software. The new startup is funded by Unit 4 Agresso, the parent company of Coda, which had sold the Coda2Go SaaS through Salesforce.com’s on-demand application store. The new company is co-headquartered from Salesforce.com’s offices in San Mateo, Calif., and from an office in Harrogate, England. Salesforce.com will provide the customer support for the startup’s core product, also called FinancialForce (formerly Coda2Go). Salesforce.com is looking to position Force.com as a platform to launch new SaaS companies. FinancialForce.com is one of their first big case studies. The new solution includes general ledger accounting, user-defined budgets, spreadsheet integration, accounts payable and receivable, and invoicing. Pricing starts at $125 per user per month, and customers do not have to be Salesforce.com customers. Yes, i know, it is "just" accounting. But if you know that force.com already has 80 Financial Apps on their marketplace, it’s obvious on how the dots will connect.

The second is nobody else The U.S. Defense Department. They just put into operation their cloud computing services for military personnel. Originally launched a year ago, the platform, called RACE (Rapid Access Computing Environment) , was initially used for testing and development of new applications. The military says RACE is ready to go live with 99.999% uptime.

The third is a company Schumachergroup .

Their CIO was speaking at the Cloud Computing conference in London this week. This presentation was by far the best of the whole conference.

75% of all their business critical apps are now in the cloud. And targeting 90 % by 2010. The rest in a traditional on-premise data center. The cloud is 99,5% uptime and is manned by 25% of their IT FTE’s. This is the area where they innovate. Their data-center is 98% uptime, has 75% of the IT FTE’s running it and it’s the data center that keeps the CIO awake. In the cloud, they can deliver 5-10 times more value faster. What does faster mean: on average 5 months to deploy a new app into the cloud.

We have invited this CIO to Innotribe at Sibos2010 to deliver a real-life case study from another industry.

See also the article "Marketplace – a commodity" on my personal blog here . Some people believe a Marketplace for Financial Services is years away, even beyond 2015. Don’t think so. It’s getting build-in in platforms.