Yesterday’s Salesforce.com outage resulted in several readers emailing me the story from the San Jose Mercury News titled ‘The Recession, the Cloud and Salesforce.com’ *. The feelings were mixed. Read on…

With all the bad news about layoffs, declining sales and falling housing markets, one company shines out:

Salesforce.com

There is no doubt they are one of the few companies still hiring (assuming those are real jobs on their career page), even outside of the Sales and Marketing department which makes up to 75% of the company.

Standard advertising mediums for recruiting includes the usual Monster, Hotjobs, Dice and good ol’ Craigslist.

But hiring trucks as moving billboards? That is old school. I’ve seem that tactic used from Police recruiting to Adult Night Clubs. My guess is it’s much cheaper than television and radio advertising.

But I have to admit it’s a great metaphor…. moving company.. going places… “hop on our ride, or stand on the sidewalk and wave goodbye to us”. Plus, that’s a lot of eyeballs looking at that sign on the congested 101. Especially US Thanksgiving weekend – the largest road travel date next to Labor Day and Memorial Day.

If that is the case, where are the Google Ads? Heck, they can use Google Site Targeting and advertise on my site! Certainly SFDC can come up with a creative ad campaign targeted to skilled workers who surf access the web 8-12 hours a day.

The Internet is the new Entertainment medium.

Here is a partial snippet from the above article:

Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Intel, AMD and other companies are slashing employees and cutting expenses.

And then there’s Salesforce.com. During Thanksgiving week, the San Francisco-based software company began driving a big white truck — a traveling billboard — up and down Highway 101 as part of a major recruiting push.

“We hired hundreds of people in the last quarter,” said chief executive Marc Benioff. “We will hire hundreds of people this quarter.”

Come to the Cloud

The country’s economic downturn has been a boon to Salesforce.com, which lets customers like Genentech, Merrill Lynch, Citi and Dell manage customer relations over the Internet. As one of the earliest boosters of cloud computing , Salesforce has benefited from technology that encourages corporations to turn over as much as of their high-tech infrastructure as possible to third parties who run software in giant data centers and deliver applications as a service over the Internet.

Instead of buying computers and hiring system administrators, companies simply rent the computing power they need. They no longer have to worry about updating individual PCs to the latest version of a software program or preparing for a massive spike in traffic.

“In virtually every industry, thousands of companies are trying to simplify and speed adoption of their products and services by transforming them into cloud services,” said Frank Gens, chief analyst at IDC.

Cloud computing will drive the next wave of expansion in the technology industry, Gens believes, and revenue related to the cloud will grow more than four times faster than revenue from more traditional technology products and services.

* previously featured at crmbuyer.com but no longer available on the site.