I’m blogging live from Salesforce.com’s inaugural Dreamforce User Conference at the Westin St Francis in San Francisco. Yes, they offer Wi-Fi in the keynote hall and that’s a wonderful thing.It’s particularly appropriate given the panel discussion I just finished hosting. The subject was “the ultimate clients for utility computing,” and as you can imagine much of our discussion focused on the wireless delivery of utility-style applications. First, what’s interesting about the utility computing paradigm is that until recently we’ve spent the majority of our time talking about infrastructure issues: Web services, provisioning, scheduling, virtualization and server consolidation are the typical buzzwords. As Ernie Cormier, VP of Business Solutions at Nextel argued on the panel, Web services are already here in the form of a range of third party Java applications already deployed on anything from cell phones to PDAs. Yes, we still can’t expect blanket coverage from wireless carrier’s infrastructure, but the applications are available.David Vaskevich, SVP & CTO at Microsoft (who, by the way, reports to Bill Gates), argued that once we have this ubiquitous network it will allow us to access everything from pictures of our kids, our favorite music and corporate data on an Internet terminal in our car. But what’s missing right now is that we need to offer users the seamless transition of data between, for example, a car’s computer and a variety of handheld devices. “We need to break down the seams,” he said. The dream is that applications will intelligently populate the device you’re using with relevant data based on your location, such as driving directions while you are in the car. Chris Thomas, Chief E-Strategist at Intel agreed, adding that e-forms and the like will help revolutionize how enterprise applications are developed and delivered. We have started moving away from a Web browser-centric UI to a series of shared application components assembled on the fly. That’s not a new message, but what is new is the fact that utility-style applications are now being delivered. It’s a challenge that my other fellow panelist, Jim Balsillie, Chairman and Co-CEO at RIM, attempted to tackle. RIM built its business on always on wireless email. But now the company is all about providing a platform for developing and delivering all manner of pre-built and distributed applications. RIM’s Blackberry, for one, is certainly not browser centric.And so that turns my thoughts to Salesforce.com. In case you missed yesterday’s news, the company unveiled an upgrade to its Sforce development platform. The company actually calls Sforce a hosted application server. So if you think about it, Salesforce.com is arguing that your applications don’t need to run on your own servers. In addition, Salesforce.com can deliver your application – complete with integrated CRM – to any device, anywhere. When Salesforce.com’s latest upgrades go live in a couple of weeks, it affirms the fact that we need to move from talking about “when” to “how” utility-style applications of any type (not just CRM) now work. Web services deployments are a reality.My final thought is this: Salesforce.com is planning to roll out ERP-style func-tionality in subsequent releases. The big message here is that the company believes it doesn’t actually matter what applications are delivered in a hosted fashion. In short, Salesforce.com is stealing pages from Amazon.com and eBay’s playbook. It’s not about hosted-CRM anymore. Salesforce.com’s business is finally becoming what CEO Marc Benioff always said it would be – a utility that sits on the Internet delivering companies any application on demand. Update: the hotel’s Internet connection is not letting my VPN create a tunnel, so Ephraim is posting this for me. Frustratingly, VPN support is something many conference venues are yet to accommodate. – Mark Jones Technology Industry