You can't put the cloud in a box, let alone a pigeonhole. People who ought to know better continue to pretend that cloud applications aren't ready for full-spectrum enterprise workloads, but enterprise developers do know better—and they're writing the apps today.

You can see the distribution, or at least get an idea of its outlines, in the results of a study (PDF) just released by CustomerSat, a unit of MarketTools Inc., from a sample of more than 1,100 companies using Force.com. In striking agreement with previous, totally separate studies by Nucleus Research and Galorath Inc., CustomerSat concluded that "on average, it’s 5.1 times faster to develop custom applications with Force.com compared to traditional on-premise development platforms."

To some extent, that's old news; what's new, at least to me, in the CustomerSat results is the information now available on the breadth of applications being built. To quote the CustomerSat report,

The most popular applications were for reporting and analytics, project management, and contract management applications. Next, respondents reported building more transaction-heavy applications, including quote and order management, billing, and commission/compensation management applications. Finally, long tail applications ranging from compliance solutions to legal management applications followed.

That phrase, "long tail," is probably known to most readers of this blog: we're nearing the fifth anniversary, somewhat to my surprise, of Chris Anderson's coinage of this label in Wired. The basic idea is that most of the potential value in a market may well be in items with tiny individual market share, representing the far extreme range of a frequency distribution. The problem in a physical marketplace is that artificial scarcities, like shelf space in bookstores, encourage vendors to stock only the items with the largest individual sales.

Enterprise application software has always been a "long tail" market, because return on investment was high enough to compel costly custom development as the price of being a competitive company. We've traditionally wound up with a marketplace in which a handful of monstrously complex products were individually modified, site by site, to meet their customers' needs.

Multi-tenant kernels and metadata-based customization, as found in Force.com, make it possible to serve the long tail with economy of scale. That's a whole new game. Let's play.