Hallelujah!!! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the new software and, let me tell you brothers and sisters, it is bea-u-ti-ful!

Sorry about that but Salesforce.com conferences so resemble religious revival meetings that’s it all some delegates can do to stop themselves from hugging their born-again cohorts and spreading the word to complete strangers.

After spending the best part of a week listening to the gospel according to Marc – Benioff that is, Salesforce’s messianic CEO – I’m all for this. Salesforce and the software-as-a-service movement have restored passion and innovation to software. You’d have to go back to the early days of client/server databases to find an audience so gung-ho.

No wonder. Salesforce has healed business technology aches from deployment and upfront cost to admin overheads and usability. Its infrastructure is secure and can scale to accommodate large numbers of users. It is Google, Amazon.com, eBay and iTunes for business and has a large revenue lead on rivals, but the action is only just beginning. Having winged and helped bring down Siebel, Salesforce is now shooting for the biggest names in enterprise software, SAP and Oracle.

Until recently I would have thought this quixotic but by opening up the Apex development platform that underlies its core code, Salesforce declared its serious intent. Nevertheless, Salesforce’s biggest challenges lie ahead.

The first of these is that Salesforce remains a salesforce automation/CRM firm that will attempt to compete with rivals with full suites of enterprise apps including HR, accounting and logistics.

Salesforce’s smart, pluralist answer is to create a platform for complementary capabilities through Apex and the AppExchange marketplace for programs. AppExchange is growing nicely but many of today’s transactions are freebies, Salesforce-built, or add useful but not critical functionality. It remains infant compared with the proven and adhesive – albeit pricey and sometimes clunky – apps on offer from giants.

Second, Salesforce remains a minnow that is only beginning to compete in markets such as government, manufacturing and energy. These clients make application choices in periods measured almost in decades rather than years and many look at vendor size before considering technology.

At the conference, I spoke to a huge energy firm that loved the product but was concerned over how long Salesforce would last. Even with a high price-to-earnings ratio, Salesforce is valued at $4.6bn compared to Oracle’s $98.7bn and SAP’s $64.4bn, never mind Microsoft’s $284.6bn.

A predatory approach from one of these rival firms would hinder Salesforce’s culture and provide no value to anybody, but the company might need powerful partners if it is not to spend the next 10 years punching way above its weight.

A tie-in with one of the consumer on-demand powers so beloved of Benioff would provide huge resources and could preserve Salesforce's missionary zeal. With Google and Amazon making forays into business IT, don’t count out the possibility of a coming together that could rattle the walls of today’s enterprise power centres.