At a recent Zuora sponsored luncheon at Butterfly restaurant in SF – CEO, Tien Tzuo shared with the packed crowd that to him, the world of billing/payment has become the financial infrastructure for the new customer centered/ pay-as-you-go pricing model he calls – the subscription economy.

I recently caught up with Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite, a cloud computing company that offers CRM to mid-sized companies. The company is enjoying a surge in business thanks to the downturn and a growing realization among companies about the many benefits of cloud based IT.

Microsoft CEO talks about new competition with Google, Amazon, and Salesforce, and why CIOs now are ready for cloud computing.

 Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has sent a message of late that Microsoft is "all in" when it comes to cloud computing. In an interview with InformationWeek editors, Ballmer made clear that this all-in cloud computing bet isn't merely a long-term, over-the-horizon play. The cloud growth--"hockey stick" growth, he said -- is taking off right now. And Ballmer makes a passionate case for how the investment Microsoft has made in cloud computing products and infrastructure over the last five years makes it different from rivals Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.

We pushed to clarify--when does that hockey stick growth take off? We're not there yet, right? "I don't know. It sure feels like we're there today to me," Ballmer said. He added, however, that most lines of business software--industry-specific applications or transaction systems, for example--aren't going to the cloud en masse yet. Platform as a service offerings, like Microsoft's Azure, haven't taken off. But with what he calls "information worker infrastructure" -- think Exchange, SharePoint, and Office software -- CIOs are ready to move quickly to the cloud.