Bangalore: Companies are increasingly taking to cloud computing to manage the increasing computing needs of the growing workforce, at a lower cost. Thus it has become a threat to existing software franchise of companies like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and SAP AG.

Already swelled to an estimated $36 billion market, cloud computing now represents roughly 13 percent of global software sales. Former Oracle executive Marc Benioff began his cloud computing company Salesforce.com, which stands with a market value of four billion dollars and has around 52,000 customers. Its revenue stands at one billion dollars in the past four fiscal quarters. "Almost everyone already runs a lot of their personal life on the Internet and there is no doubt that the future of business applications will be there too. It's just a matter of when companies are ready to make the move," said Zachary Nelson, Head of cloud computing specialist NetSuite, which boosted its revenue during the past four quarters to $143 million.

The internet search and advertising firm Google has enabled Genentech to shift to cloud computing through which the company's e-mail, as well as some word processing, spreadsheet and calendar applications will run over an online connection of the former. In fact, through this, Google also hopes to bleed revenue from Microsoft and surpass its biggest rival in the race to control the gears of computing. So, to deal with the competition, Microsoft is planning for a new operating system for cloud computing, called "Azure," that is supposed to make it easier to toggle between programs stored on a hard drive and on the Web. But Google considers it to be a profitable move as it brings more credibility to the concept.

However, breaking old habits particularly with business-software powerhouses Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and SAP AG all maneuvering to protect their existing, lucrative software franchises while also setting up their own online services to compete with the industry upstarts, will not be a cakewalk. Infact, Genentech itself is not yet ready to entirely abandon Microsoft's business softwares. It's still licensing Microsoft programs like Word for writing documents and Excel for creating spreadsheets.