There has been a lot of buzz about Apple's latest brainchild, the iCloud. The purpose of the iCloud is to bring your information together across all Apple devices. Download a song on your iPod and it is automatically synched with your Mac, iPad, iPhone, and whatever other Apple devices you might own.

Salesforce.com is the recognized 800-pound gorilla in cloud CRM software. However, while they may own "CRM" on the stock exchange, they do not own the market. Salesforce's tool is fairly intuitive with deep Sales Force Automation (SFA) functionality. It should definitely make your shortlist, but what other companies should you be looking at? Below are five alternative cloud CRM systems that are worth adding to your shortlist of vendors.

Marketing automation software is still considered a relative newcomer in the enterprise software space. However, there are new entrants popping up regularly, leading to a lot of activity and buzz in the market. With the growth in this space, the topic of venture capital comes up fairly often. Some vendors are taking on new rounds from top tier VCs, while others are pursuing what they perceive to be the more sustainable method of bootstrapping.