Computing in the cloud and Web 2.0 were cited as today's cutting-edge, game-changing innovations during a developer relations conference Monday that featured presentations by Salesforce.com and Cisco Systems.

Officials from these companies presented at the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in Redwood City, California. In-the-cloud computing, or SaaS, represents a shift from client-server, said Adam Gross, Salesforce.com vice president of sales and marketing.

"I think the impact of that shift for developers is only beginning to be understood," Gross said.

With the SaaS model, multi-tenancy means users have a shared instance of an application. But the transition from SaaS to PaaS (platform as a service) allows customized programmability while maintaining the multi-tenant model, said Gross. Salesforce.com calls its PaaS program Force.com, for delivering software on demand.

PaaS will drive the future of software, and if the industry is moving to SaaS, it is not going to proceed with client-server development tools, Gross said.

Salesforce.com experiences more API traffic and more SOAP Web services and XML traffic than Web page traffic. This means more people use the system from other computers and other programming languages from a developer context than end-users accessing the system from a Web browser, Gross said.

Meanwhile, Salesforce.com has been successful with the multi-tenancy model and is on its way to becoming the first US$1 billion vendor in the SaaS category, said Gross.

With client-server, the technology stack had to be rebuilt for every application. In cloud computing, it is about just building the applications. Meanwhile, everyone is becoming a developer in a new mass innovation model, he said.

A Cisco official, meanwhile, emphasized the company's purchase of the WebEx Web-conferencing service.

"Some of you may be wondering what Cisco has to do with Web 2.0," said Gary Griffiths, president of WebEx products and operations at Cisco. He then cited the importance of collaboration and Web 2.0 benefits for business.

"In Cisco WebEx, we're developing a set of Web 2.0 collaborative applications," Griffiths said. These collaborative applications are targeted at knowledge workers. Cisco also is promoting business mashups that unite people, process and data into a single UI.

Collaborative applications are delivered to end-users through a unified communications/collaboration client. Cisco, for its part, is a heavy user of WebEx, using it to manage a global development team. "We use WebEx more than Boeing," which has 120,000 customers using it, Griffiths said.