Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but educated guesses put the value of the deal at between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion. Hybris is known primarily for competing with IBM’s WebSphere Commerce Suite and Oracle’s Commerce Suite. And it’s also worth noting that the deal is taking place a week after Netsuite, the cloud business software player, said it was getting into the “commerce as a service” business and announced a big customer win with Williams Sonoma.

Analyst Karl Keirstead of BMO Capital Markets, in a note sent to clients earlier today, said he was positive on the acquisition. “Demand for new commerce platforms appears to be robust and the space is attracting new entrants,” he wrote. SAP, he said, had previously struggled to get any traction in e-commerce, and the acquisition essentially puts it among the top three players, along with Oracle and IBM. Also, most of Hybris’ clients are in Europe.

Keirstead raised his revenue estimate for SAP to 17.5 billion euros (about $23 billion) for 2013 and left his EPS estimate at 3.48 euros, or $4.56 a share.

At its SuiteWorld conference in San Jose, Calif., today, CEO Zach Nelson announced that cookware retailer Williams-Sonoma had picked NetSuite’s SuiteCommerce product as the backbone of its expansion into Australia.

If you think back, it was a year ago tomorrow that NetSuite moved into what it called at the time commerce-as-a-service, adding another option to the blank-as-a-service meme that tends to crop up in discussions around companies that offer pretty much anything via cloud infrastructure.

Nelson told me that Williams-Sonoma was able to roll the entire service out to four brands in three months. “It’s a very important win for us,” he said.

The point of SuiteCommerce is to create a seamless experience for customers, whether they’re buying something online or on the Web. As customers have essentially come to expect to be able to buy anything and everything online, the traditional back-end commerce engines like Microsoft’s Dynamics, Sage and others have tended to be imperfectly combined with patchwork products for selling on the Web.

The combination has never been ideal. Customer-facing bits have rarely if ever been unified with the ones that also face suppliers. That has a way of complicating things like managing inventory and supply chains. And things are getting even more complicated as machines are programmed to automatically buy things from other machines based on a predefined set of circumstances.

NetSuite built SuiteCommerce to speak directly to the core enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) functions that are already its bread and butter. In English, that means that the new engine comes into the process already knowing everything it needs to know about the business.

Separately NetSuite announced a partnership with AutoDesk, the design software company, that it says will speed up the process of designing and manufacturing a product, and also help take costs out along the way.

It’s also worth noting that NetSuite shares are trading at their highest levels ever today. They’re up 2.5 percent to $94.42.

A little less than an hour ago, NetSuite reported a 32 percent jump in revenue to $91.6 million, while recurring revenue — a key metric for cloud companies that sell their software on a subscription basis — grew by 28 percent to $74 million. Cash flow from operations was also up by 39 percent to $14.7 million.

On a non-GAAP basis, NetSuite earned $2.8 million, or 4 cents a share, which was down slightly from the year-ago period of 6 cents, but it also beat the expectations of analysts, who had forecast EPS of 3 cents on sales of $90.9 million. On a GAAP basis, it lost $13 million, or 18 cents a share, versus $7.7 million, or 11 cents a share, in the year-ago quarter.

While NetSuite has traditionally served small and medium businesses, the company started going after bigger fish last year, selling its ERP software that competes with offerings from software giant SAP and Oracle to global subsidiaries. In time, enough of those subsidiaries will come to rely on NetSuite that some will standardize on it across the entire company. “We have a lot of pilot projects going, and those pilots are starting to expand,” Nelson told me in a call earlier today. “As they begin to see the product and start to like it, a lot of those large enterprises are beginning to look for other places within the organization that they can deploy NetSuite.”

That’s probably why NetSuite just raised its guidance for the rest of the year. On a conference call with analysts moments ago, CEO Zach Nelson just boosted the company’s outlook on fiscal 2013 sales. The company now expects to report FY13 sales in the range of $404 million to $408 million. The old range was $397 million to $402 million. A bad sign of doings in the cloud business it is not.

A company called MuleSoft specializes in helping companies do exactly that. It started out as an on-premise platform, but has since shifted to one based in the cloud. A textbook case: Getting data from one cloud-based application — say, Salesforce.com — working with another — say, Workday. You might want information about your sales team’s performance integrated with your human-resources information so you can keep track of who’s performing well and who isn’t.

Typically, you’d do that yourself, taking advantage of APIs provided by both companies. You’d assign a team of developers to create a custom process and workflow. It would take more time than you’d want it to, and would probably cost more than you’d like.

“All those problems about integrating data become exponentially greater in the cloud,” mainly because there are more applications and there’s also just more data, said MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott. There are, he said, something like 2,100 different companies offering software-as-a-service applications, plus a whole bunch of older legacy on-premise enterprise software products. And every company has its own mix-and-match combination.

The good news is that most, if not all, of these applications have their APIs, meaning that, in theory, a programmer can take advantage of them. And that’s where MuleSoft steps in. One API doesn’t natively talk to another API. At a high level, MuleSoft sits as the middleman between them all. It has a repository of 13,000 or more APIs, and has an SaaS platform that connects them all together. The time required to integrate data in two or more applications is cut from weeks or months to hours or days.

The problem isn’t getting smaller. The number of open APIs available is multiplying, and in a few more years will reach into the hundreds of thousands.

Founded in 2003, its timing couldn’t have been better. Companies like Salesforce, NetSuite, Workday, SuccessFactors and others all sought to shift important business applications out of the office and into the cloud. And now running things in the cloud is more often than not preferred, because in the long run it’s cheaper — cloud companies tend to charge on a subscription basis — and easier.

So MuleSoft has been on fire. Its customers run the gamut from banks to automakers to media companies: Barclays, J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo are all customers, as are BMW and Tesla. Facebook and Box and Intuit are customers, too. More than 150,000 developers at more than 3,200 companies are using MuleSoft’s platform.

Today, the company announced that it has raised $37 million in a Series E round of venture capital funding, led by NEA. Salesforce.com is also investing in this round. Prior investors participating include Hummer Winblad, Morgenthaler Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAP Ventures (the venture capital arm of software giant SAP) and Bay Partners. The round brings MuleSoft’s total capital raised to $81 million. An IPO is probably not far off.

Here’s one reason for Salesforce’s interest: One of MuleSoft’s newer products is an app called Dataloader.io, that is available on the Salesforce App Exchange. It’s designed to move data from pretty much any application into Salesforce.com. Within weeks, it shot to No. 1 on the App Exchange, and remains the most popular app there today, Schott told me.

Another new product was announced today. It’s called Anypoint, and it’s described as the only complete integration platform to cover applications across the entire spectrum of cloud or on-premise, and to get the data in them working together.

Yuri Arcurs / Shutterstock.com

Even customer service has started a shift to the cloud, and a company that specializes in precisely that is Parature. I first encountered Parature in 2011. The basic idea with its cloud-based software is to reduce the cost and time commitment required to answer the same support questions over and over. Simple as that.

Well, building on a partnership first established two years ago, Parature is about to announce that it is teaming up with Microsoft, the maker of Dynamics CRM software.

The new integration will give Dynamics users a platform from which to engage with customers on the Web, via live chat session, on their mobile devices or through social networks.

Key features include a self-service part that creates a knowledge base customers can use to get quick answers to regular questions on their own. Repeated questions tend to eat up a lot of time and attention that could be better spent elsewhere.

There’s also a chat service, so your service agents can be right there in real time. And there’s a social component as well, including Parature for Facebook and support for Twitter. Yes, customer support happens there, too.

The point of the integration is to get customer data that lives in the CRM application all in the same place as records of support calls and help requests. Logical, right?

Anyway, Parature has come a long way since I last looked in on it. It has been used to support approximately 55 million end users worldwide, and its customers include IBM and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It’s backed by about $30 million in VC investments from Accel Partners, Valhalla Partners and Sierra Ventures.

Image: Yuri Arcurs / Shutterstock.com

SAP shares fell more than 4 percent as the company reported revenue came in at €5.02 billion ($6.7 billion), constituting an increase of about 9 percent year-on-year. Operating profits were €1.59 billion. Since the results were preliminary, the company didn’t report net profits. That disclosure will come on Jan 23.

The sales results missed the mark that analysts had been expecting: Sales of €5.13 billion and an operating profit of €1.95 billion.

The new HANA product that was the focus of the big launch last week moves business data into memory chips and off spinning hard drives, thus making access to that data more immediate. The company has been working on a transition from its existing suite of on-premise software applications for businesses for several years and announced the completion of the process last week. And while sales of HANA were stronger than expected at €194 million, they still make up a relatively small slice of SAP’s overall revenue pie.

Also, last week co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe said without elaborating that the company’s medium-term guidance will be revised upward. Currently the company expects to report annual sales of €20 billion by 2015.

SAP competes closely with software giant Oracle as well as with certain cloud-based software companies including Netsuite, Salesforce.com and Workday.

NetSuite called it SuiteCommerce, and it has turned out to be a pretty big deal. In fact, one of its key partners was a smallish company called Retail Anywhere that specializes in point-of-sale terminals and software. Retail Anywhere had decided to build its next generation of POS terminals using SuiteCommerce. Retail Anywhere had created the popular Retail Anywhere point-of-sale app for Apple’s iOS devices. The two companies went to market jointly, and the result was a surprise for at least one of them. “We crushed them with demand,” NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson told me.

Today, NetSuite announced that it has bought Retail Anywhere. Financial terms aren’t being disclosed, because it’s not material to NetSuite’s finances. Nelson told me that NetSuite and Retail Anywhere had 30 joint customers, but that among its existing customer base, there are 500 companies who consider themselves retailers that could could take advantage of the combined offering. And there are thousands of existing Retail Anywhere customers — the company has been around for 28 years — who will get exposed to NetSuite.

One thing that’s not staying, Nelson said, is the point-of-sale hardware. “We’re going to get out that business,” he said. Eventually, he said, in-store retail will look a lot more like e-commerce. “More and more, you’re seeing sales reps walking around stores with iPads, swiping credit cards,” he says.

And things like that are having an effect on shoppers’ attitudes. A Deloitte survey conducted during the 2012 holiday season found that retailers who had several touchpoints through which to engage with a consumer had a 71 percent greater chance of selling to them than those who relied only on the old-school brick-and-mortar approach. What it means is that stores who can reach a customer both online and in person are more likely to sell to them. And that means you need to unify the experience. Pricing and inventory, for example, need to be in sync.

NetSuite is due to report earnings on Feb. 4 later this month. Analysts expect it to report a four-cent-per-share profit on sales of about $83 million, and for it to close its fiscal 2012 with about $307 million in sales. NetSuite shares rose at the open this morning by about 30 cents on the news, to $70.65. The shares rose by more than 66 percent in 2012.

Levie will be debuting an array of partnerships with Oracle, NetSuite, Concur, Jive, FuzeBox, Cornerstone, SugarCRM, Zendesk and others, where Box has developed hooks to HTML5-ify what they are doing, so customers of these applications can use all their tools together, instead of in different silos. The company calls this Box Embed, and it was announced earlier this morning.

His openers today are venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and eBay CEO John Donahoe.

8:41 am: Andreessen and Donahoe kick off with some political jokes (the eBay CEO’s wife, Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe, is U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council). Andreessen notes that he joined the eBay board shortly after Donahoe was hired.

Andreessen hypes recent eBay progress, including mobile growth, acquisitions of Milo and RedLaser, and the spinoff of Skype (a big deal for him at Andreessen Horowitz). Then he talks about the great stock price. Eventually, he may let Donahoe talk, but we’ll see.

8:48 am: Donahoe says that five years ago it was clear that the eBay user experience was behind. “I started using the ‘T’ word,” he said — with the eBay turnaround being user experience, pricing, policies.

Andreessen asks about company culture. Donahoe says he has replaced 80 of the top 100 people at eBay. The outsiders bring objectivity and new skills. “You can’t change the culture unless you change the people,” he says.

Donahoe says that even though he’s not a founder-CEO, he can inject that energy into the company with acquisitions where the founders take leadership roles — like how 25-year-old Milo CEO Jack Abraham is now head of all of eBay Local, and Zong CEO David Marcus now leads PayPal.

Andreessen sets up two competing mobile theories: Peter Thiel versus Aneel Bhusri of Workday. Thiel says the Yelp of mobile with be Yelp, etc. Meanwhile, Bhusri says mobile is an architecture change that’s fundamental, so there will be new leaders. Which do you believe, he asks Donahoe — clearly a loaded question, considering that eBay is the e-commerce incumbent. EBay apps have been downloaded 100 million times, Donahoe replies. And payments are going to change more in the next three years than they did in the past 20.

9:08 am: Andreessen: Talk about the cloud. Oh, maybe they are going to finally talk about stuff that’s more related to Box!

Donahoe says eBay has always been a cloud company, but it’s increasingly so. He uses Box on his iPad, and his product team loves it, too. Infomercial time!

9:14 am: Donahoe says his big takeaway for the next five years is: “Most people are underestimating how fundamentally the shopping and paying experience is going to change.”

9:17 am: Time for Aaron Levie, who leaps out doing the “Gangnam Style” dance.

He says Box started in 2005 with the goal of helping people manage content from any device.

Today, Box has more than 140,000 active businesses, 14 million users, and 92 percent of the Fortune 500. That’s more than double a year ago.

Now he’s doing some light stand-up about the state of the tech industry. “Larry Ellison joined Twitter, did exactly one tweet, then celebrated by buying an island.”

Box works faster than the competition, Levie says, as much as 10 million times faster in Tokyo. This part is vague, but there is a pretty map.

Box has had a 10x increase in iOS usage, and a 30x increase on Android in the past year.

And there’s been a 72 percent increase in the number of businesses that have taken the product through their entire enterprise.

9:27 am: Levie’s big themes — and these are shockers — are: social, cloud and mobile.

Microsoft was founded around the idea of a PC on every desk in every home — Levie notes this was before his time, though not his COO’s. The challenges were that you needed to move data around physically; it was hard to collaborate; there were lots of error messages; the limit of client-server was met. So now it’s time for post-PC, where we can share and work from anywhere.

Now, instead of a computer on every desk, it’s a computer in every hand.

So Box wants to integrate the world of users and the world of IT.

9:40 am: Following a customer video, Levie says he’s getting to the news, which is around getting to and sharing data in more easy and elegant ways.

Box had never really highlighted search — some users didn’t even know Box had it. A new version of the site moves search to the top center of the page. Levie says his own Box account has access to 100,000 files, so search is critical for him. In the redesign, users will also be able to “Like” content and use other social Facebook-y features.

Users can do things like create Microsoft Word documents directly from the site, and there’s more of a sense of a company network where anyone with an email domain on the same URL can work together.

Levie talks about how customers often feel pressured to buy from one particular vendor. He’s after Larry Ellison again, showing an image of Darth Vader while talking about lock-in.

So Box is launching Box Embed (as I noted way up top in the intro) with 10 partners: Concur, Cornerstone, DocuSign, Eloqua, Zendesk, Jive, NetSuite, Oracle, SugarCRM and FuzeBox.

Demo shows how all this sharing, creating and viewing stuff can be built directly into NetSuite.

Folks from NetSuite and Jive come up to talk about how working together with Box is great. But still, it’s clear that everyone wants to be a platform, not an app on someone else’s platform.

10:10 am: On to mobile. The number of enterprise-relevant apps has doubled in the past year, Levie says. Given how fast mobile devices change, and how pervasive they are, companies should embrace BYOD (bring your own device), he argues. So Box is adding to its existing OneCloud platform for mobile (launched six months ago).

50 percent of Box traffic is now from mobile, which is a big increase.

So today there are 100 more new OneCloud apps, doubling the available amount.

More demos: This time, Mindjet jumping between iPad and Web app.

The new Box vision, says Levie, is to give people the ability to work with anyone, anywhere, from any device.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

In the TV interview (see it below), Ellison made news, saying that Oracle will not be doing any large acquisitions, especially NetApp, the storage concern that has been occasionally mentioned as a possible target. Ellison said there would be no large acquisitions.

“We think we have all the assets in-house to grow very rapidly on an organic basis,” he said.

Baritoromo had clearly been reading AllThingsD because she made a point to call out Ellison’s 45 percent share of NetSuite. In a subtle dig at Salesforce.com and its CEO Marc Benioff, Ellison has been calling Oracle “the first cloud computing company.”

Then it was on to his keynote — his second of the conference — where he revisited in additional detail some of the points he made in his first keynote from Sunday, but also did some demos.

For one thing, Ellison reminded the audience that while Oracle may not yet be the biggest software-as-a-service company by revenue, it does offer more applications on a SAAS basis than anyone else — which, given Oracle’s just-completed rewrite of its entire suite of applications for the cloud, is a factual claim.

But he also made some important pronouncements around his view of how the cloud runs, again making subtle digs at the competition. “When you run in the cloud, you also pick the infrastructure that it runs on,” he said. That’s a dig at Salesforce and other smaller SAAS companies that seek to compete in some manner or another with Oracle. Sign on for the application, you’re stuck with the platform and other infrastructure that the company selling it has running in their data center.

It was an easy segue from there to Oracle’s public and private cloud offerings. Ellison said Oracle has about 400 customers using its new Fusion applications. He said about two thirds of those customers were running their applications in Oracle’s public cloud, while about one third were doings so on dedicated machines on premise.

But since both the public and private cloud are essentially equivalent — after all, they run on the same hardware and the same software — it’s easy for a company to change its mind. “They can move to an Oracle private cloud or public cloud without changing anything,” he said. “It’s very easy to move applications back and forth.” He thinks many of those customers will do just that and switch over to the public cloud within a year. “We’ll have more visibility into that by this time next year,” he said.

Part one of Ellison’s CNBC interview is below. The other parts, where he talks about increasing Oracle’s dividend, explains why the hardware business shrank, why he bought all those houses, calls his late friend Steve Jobs irreplaceable, and then kidded Baritoromo about buying the LA Lakers are also all online.

While talk of the cloud has been dominating every aspect of Oracle OpenWorld, the massive tech conference that runs through Wednesday Thursday in San Francisco, NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson has been delivering key applications to help executives run their businesses, large and small, from the cloud.

Salesforce and NetSuite were effectively founded as a result of a single 1998 conversation involving Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Evan Goldberg, NetSuite’s current CTO. After another company Goldberg had started crashed and burned, Ellison asked him what he wanted to do next. His answer, as Nelson told me by phone yesterday, was a software company like Siebel Systems, but one that delivered a customer relationship application via the Internet’s pipes, without having to be installed on a local machine.

Ellison said it was a fine idea, but that there was a greater need for a company that delivered software in the same way but was used to manage the business. Goldberg took that idea and created what was initially called NetLedger, and is now NetSuite. Benioff called Ellison back two weeks later and said he was going to start the Siebel-like company that Goldberg had initially envisioned.

While Ellison invested in them both, it is NetSuite that is known affectionately as “Larry’s other company.” Now NetSuite is on track to report sales north of $300 million for the year. It next reports earnings on Nov. 2 and is currently in a quiet period, so Nelson couldn’t talk about the state of business right now.

Even so, later today, Nelson will take the stage for a keynote at Oracle OpenWorld. He’ll have some news to make: NetSuite today announced a new two-tier version of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that connects to Oracle’s E-Business Suite.

While NetSuite has traditionally been the kind of cloud company where software is accessible to smaller and mid-sized companies, with tens of thousands of customers and an average deal size of $50,000, Nelson says it is starting to move upmarket, penetrating ever larger companies and subsidiaries of major multinational companies.

Nelson explained it like this: When those large multinational companies run ERP software, they tend to standardize on Oracle or its primary competitor SAP. “These are systems that are architected for $2 billion corporations, but not for the next tier down, the $200 million subsidiary,” Nelson said. Those smaller units would run a mixture of ERP systems geared to the midmarket companies like Sage in the U.K., Great Plains in the U.K. and MYOB in Australia. “It was like a Tower of Babel,” Nelson says.

Examples of companies already taking this two-tier approach include Pitney Bowes, which runs SAP at the corporate level but NetSuite in certain divisions. Procter & Gamble uses NetSuite to run several divisions in Asia; at the corporate level, it’s an SAP shop. “That’s the existing two-tier environment today,” Nelson said.

Now those subsidiaries are turning to NetSuite OneWorld, using it to connect with the parent’s Oracle system. Today, NetSuite announced a new version that’s geared toward this “two-tier” approach.

With new versions of NetSuite OneWorld and new SuiteCloud Connectors for Oracle, customers should be able to see a fuller picture of what’s going on across the entire corporation, without the silo effect that tends to happen within subsidiaries and divisions.

NetSuite also announced that numerous partners will be reselling it, including Dell via its cloud-integration service Boomi, IBM via its Cast Iron Systems integration unit, as well as Pervasive Software and Informatica.

Bowing a bit to uncertainties brought on by the world economy, especially given the turmoil in Europe, Gartner revised the forecast downward a bit from its previous estimate.

Within that big bucket of spending are several classes of applications; the biggest by far is ERP, or enterprise resource allocation, which is the bread and butter of companies like SAP, Oracle and, in the cloud, Netsuite. Gartner says that’s going to be a $25 billion business this year.

After that is Office Suites, which is dominated by Microsoft Office, at $16.5 billion.

Business intelligence, a sector where there’s been a lot of start-up activity — companies like Domo, Birst and Good Data come to mind — is a $13 billion business.

That’s tied with CRM (customer relationship management) at $13 billion as well, most of it split among Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com.

And speaking of Salesforce, Gartner notes that more companies are demanding applications as a service, which most people describe simply as “in the cloud,” which is why we’re seeing traditional on-premise players like Oracle and SAP shifting toward cloud-based offerings and buying up younger cloud software companies.

Even with all the hype the cloud companies get, they make up a relatively small portion of overall software spending. Gartner says cloud and software-as-a-service offerings will account for only 16 percent of the enterprise software business by 2015.

Gartner’s Tom Eid said that the increase reflects overall market demand, with more buyers evaluating their options during the current technology refresh cycle, and returning buyer confidence for enterprise software as the market slowly recovers and organizations resume investing in technology. SaaS and cloud-based services are forecast to grow in usage, expanding from 11 percent of enterprise application spending in 2010 to 16 percent in 2015.

Other examples that have punctured my attention bubble in recent years are platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service and storage-as-a-service, and there are probably many more. Then they get turned into ever-weirder acroynyms: Saas, PaaS, Iaas. You get the idea.

Today, Netsuite, the cloud player whose traditional approach is essentially to run your business from the cloud, today contributed its own new thing offered as a service: Commerce. (Cue the acronym: CaaS.)

One of the big things that businesses have to do is buy and sell goods and services from other businesses. The most basic example is that widget makers have to buy cardboard boxes from a supplier, because the goods don’t show up on the loading dock by magic. The same goes for every bit of physical stuff a business needs and also the services it pays for to keep its operations running smoothly.

Netsuite isn’t just managing the back-end business-to-business commerce, but also the direct-to-customer type of commerce. And the experience works pretty much anywhere a customer may be coming from: On a phone, tablet or PC, in a store or on social media.

As customers have essentially come to expect to be able to buy anything and everything online, the traditional back-end commerce engines like Microsoft Dynamics, Great Plains, Sage and even SAP were imperfectly combined with patchwork solutions for selling on the Web. And the bits of the system that faced customers have rarely if ever been unified with the ones that also face suppliers, which has a way of complicating things like inventory, the supply chain and everything else that stems from basic ebb and flow of supply and demand.

And things are getting even more complicated as machines are programmed to automatically buy things from other machines based on a pre-defined set of circumstances.

NetSuite has built what it calls a commerce engine — dubbed SuiteCommerce — that speaks directly to the core enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) functions that are already its bread and butter. In English that means that the new engine comes into the process already knowing what everything is, and also who everyone is. That makes it ready to wheel and deal not only with customers but also with suppliers. And when you get down to it, that’s a good way to reduce a lot of friction in any business, which is pretty much what cloud computing is supposed to be about.

The commerce service was probably the biggest news to come out of Netsuite’s SuiteWorld conference in San Francisco today, where CEO Zach Nelson (pictured) gave a keynote address. The company also announced a partnership with Square, the maker of little white credit-card reading thingies that you can insert into an iPhone or iPad for the purpose of accepting payment. Square’s Register application has been integrated with SuiteCommerce, so if you see more businesses using Squares, maybe this has something to do with it.

Nesuite, based in San Mateo, Calif., reported per-share earnings of 6 cents on a non-GAAP basis, double the consensus that analysts had projected. Revenue for the quarter was $69.3 million, which also beat the consensus and represented year-over-year growth of 30 percent. Cash flow from operations, at $10.6 million, was up 58 percent. Calculated billings — the sum of revenue plus the change in deferred revenue, and a key indicator of future revenue given Netsuite’s subscription-based business — rose 26 percent to $78 million.

Netsuite shares rose during the regular trading session to $50.47, up $2.45 or more than 5 percent, before the results were reported. The shares fell 89 cents or 1.75 percent in after-hours trading.

Netsuite’s statement is below.

NETSUITE ANNOUNCES FIRST QUARTER 2012 FINANCIAL RESULTS

• Record Q1 Revenue of $69.3 Million, a 30% Year-over-Year Increase

• Recurring Revenue Grows 27% Year-over-Year to $58.0 Million

• Non-GAAP Net Income Grows 116% Year-over-Year

• Operating Cash Flow Grows 58% Year-over-Year to $10.6 Million

SAN MATEO, Calif. – April 26, 2012 – NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), the industry’s leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP software suites, today announced operating results for its first quarter ended March 31, 2012.

Total revenue for the first quarter of 2012 was $69.3 million, representing a 30% increase over the prior year. Subscription and support revenue for the first quarter of 2012 was $58.0 million, representing a 27% increase over the same period in the prior year.

Calculated billings, defined as revenue plus the change in deferred revenue, were $77.9 million for the first quarter of 2012, a 26% increase over the first quarter of 2011.

Cash flow from operations was $10.6 million in the first quarter of 2012, an increase of $3.9 million, or 58%, over the same period last year.

On a GAAP basis, net loss for the first quarter of 2012 was $7.7 million, or $(0.11) per share, as compared to a net loss of $7.7 million, or $(0.12) per share, in the first quarter of 2011.

Non-GAAP net income for the first quarter of 2012 was $4.1 million, or $0.06 per share, as compared to non-GAAP net income of $1.9 million, or $0.03 per share, in the first quarter of 2011.

“NetSuite’s Q1 results continue the momentum of 2011 as companies large and small accelerate their move from pre-Web client/server solutions to NetSuite’s cloud-based offerings. Our great Q1 reinforces that this migration from legacy offerings like Microsoft Dynamics GP/Great Plains, Sage and SAP to NetSuite continues unabated in 2012,” said Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite. “All companies, even non-technology companies, have realized they are cloud companies, and to effectively transition their business to this new model of reaching customers, they need to build their enterprise around an application suite like NetSuite that was designed to support operations in the Cloud Age.”

But there’s another alternative, called SugarCRM, that has been gaining traction, and which positions itself as an alternative to Salesforce. It’s open source, runs both in the cloud and on-premise, and it has a million end users at 7,000 companies in 192 countries.

Today, SugarCRM announced that it had raised $33 million in equity and debt financing. New Enterprise Associates led the round, and Brooke Seawell, an NEA partner, joined Sugar’s board. Silicon Valley Bank and Gold Hill Capital joined as new investors, while prior investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International also participated.

The company saw sales increase by 67 percent last year and added 2,700 new customer companies, making SugarCRM, by its count, the third-most popular CRM product in the world.

For the fourth quarter, sales were $64.1 million, up 23 percent over the prior year, led mostly by growth in subscription and support revenue. Non-GAAP profits were 5 cents per share or $3.4 million. Sales for the year were $236 million, up 22 percent year over year. The EPS number beat the consensus of analysts by a penny. Shares are up by 4 percent in after-hours trading, having risen 4 percent already during the regular session.

I’ll be talking to CEO Zach Nelson (pictured) within the hour and will be adding a comment or two from him.

Update: I just got off the phone with Nelson and we had a quick chat about the results. Here’s a summary.

AllThingsD: Zach, the results were pretty positive. You grew revenue 23 percent year on year. What’s driving the growth?

Nelson: It’s really about the acceleration of cloud computing. There no other way to say it. Cloud computing is now moving to mission-critical functions. In 2007 I said we were reaching a tipping point with the cloud, and now the market has tipped. The new generation of companies like Square and Roku think of the cloud first as they build their operations. They’re not going to build the big IT staffs that other companies have. They’re going to skip that entirely.

What kinds of headwinds are you seeing and where?

Nothing significant. We grew by double digits in Europe, Asia and the U.S. There’s been a lot of discussion about IT spending shrinking. I think that’s a tailwind for us because we help companies cut their IT spend. We help them eliminate costs.

What are you seeing in 2012? What kind of guidance did you give?

We said we see revenue in the range of $295 million to $300 million and earnings per share of 19 to 21 cents non-GAAP. We’re going to continue to grow the top line and we’re going to hire 500 people this year.

After SAP acquired SuccessFactors and Oracle bought RightNow, people started saying Netsuite is one of the cloud companies likely to be acquired soon. What do you think?

We’re a public company, and so if anyone came along with a serious offer we’d have to consider it. But our whole mission is to build the next great software company.

SAP and IBM and Oracle and Microsft have the cloud religion these days, too. They say they can deliver their apps in the cloud just as you do. What about that?

I love it when SAP and Microsoft talk about the cloud. All they do is talk, and all they do is create more demand for Netsuite. They give credibility to the product we have built over the last decade. They may try to build a product that looks a lot like Netsuite. We’ll gobble up the demand they create along the way. It will take them a decade to do it because there’s no shortcut.

NetSuite’s press release is below.

SAN MATEO, Calif., Feb. 2, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — NetSuite Inc., the industry’s leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP software suites, today announced operating results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year ended December 31, 2011.

Total revenue for the fourth quarter of 2011 was $64.1 million, representing a 23% increase over the prior year. Subscription and support revenue for the fourth quarter was $54.2 million, representing 23% growth over the same period in the prior year. Total revenue for the year was $236.3 million, a year-over-year increase of 22%.

Calculated billings, defined as revenue plus the change in deferred revenue, were $78.8 million for the quarter, a 36% increase over the fourth quarter of 2010. For the year, calculated billings were $266.9 million, an increase of 32% over 2010.

Cash flow from operations was $11.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, an increase of $7.1 million, or 156%, over the same period last year. Cash flow from operations was $36.3 million for the year, an increase of $18.0 million, or 99%, over the prior year.

On a GAAP basis, net loss for the fourth quarter of 2011 was $7.6 million, or $(0.11) per share, as compared to a net loss of $6.4 million, or $(0.10) per share, in the fourth quarter of 2010. GAAP net loss for the year ended December 31, 2011 was $32.0 million, or $(0.48) per share, as compared to a GAAP net loss of $27.5 million, or $(0.43) per share, in 2010.

Non-GAAP net income for the fourth quarter of 2011 was $3.4 million, or $0.05 per share, as compared to non-GAAP net income of $2.8 million, or $0.04 per share, in the fourth quarter of 2010. Non-GAAP net income for the year ended December 31, 2011 was $10.8 million, or $0.15 per share, as compared to non-GAAP net income of $8.5 million, or $0.13 per share, in 2010.

“NetSuite’s Q4 showed the benefit of being the disrupter rather than a disruptee, as our Cloud Computing suite continued to take market share from traditional mid-market and enterprise ERP vendors. The acceleration of our business that we saw throughout the year continued into Q4, and we turned in a Q4 that could be considered our best quarter ever as a public company,” said Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite. “As we enter 2012, I believe we are the best positioned company to benefit from the shift to the Cloud as customers abandon aging mission critical systems designed before the Web existed and move to NetSuite.”

The traditional narrative of cloud companies like SuccessFactors, NetSuite and Salesforce.com has looked a little like this: Scrappy cloud upstart aims to change the established way of doing things and paints a target on the established, big software company that controls the marketplace. Said upstart systematically goes after its customers, starting with the smaller ones. Big company pretends not to notice.

SAP has regularly been portrayed as the villain in that story. Talk to any vendor of cloud-based software that’s aimed at running some aspect of a business, and it doesn’t take long for the founders to start talking about SAP as the company whose business they would most like to disrupt.

The part of the story that hasn’t played out yet, but which appears to be starting, is that eventually the big companies do notice, and when they do, they start buying. SuccessFactors is the second acquisition of an enterprise cloud software company in as many months. The other was Oracle’s $1.4 billion deal for RightNow.

The first and most obvious thing that’s going to result from the SAP deal is that speculation will surge about another, similar deal. Already this morning, analysts at BMO Capital have upgraded Taleo, a SuccessFactors rival, on the theory that it is now in play and that Oracle is the most likely buyer. Taleo specializes in cloud-based talent management software, and is about the same size by revenue as SuccessFactors. Publicly traded since 2005, Taleo saw its shares close Friday at $32.96, within 13 percent of its historic high of $37.10, giving the company a market capitalization of about $1.4 billion and making it a relatively easy target for Oracle and its $32 billion war chest. BMO boosted its price target on Taleo shares to $40 from $28.

Another one to watch is Workday, yet another provider of cloud-based human resources software, which last month raised $85 million at an implied valuation of $2 billion as warm-up for an expected IPO next year. It’s on track to do about $320 million in billings in 2011, and is nearing profitability.

Another company that will probably be considered for takeout is NetSuite, the company that specializes in cloud-based software for running a business. Trading as of Friday at a valuation just shy of $3 billion, it could be a takeover target, too, though its business is humming along just fine. It’s on its way to closing the year with sales north of $235 million — much of that derives from taking customers away from SAP.

NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson said the SuccessFactors deal basically confirms that Netsuite’s approach has been the right one all along. “It’s far more beneficial for NetSuite than it is for SAP,” he told me by email over the weekend. “With this acquisition, SAP has told their customers that the path NetSuite pioneered a decade ago is the future, while the acquisition does little to advance their own product architecture.”

Which raises another question: What will this deal do for SAP? In the plus column, it makes SAP a share-gainer and not a share-loser in the $13 billion talent management software business, and improves its competitive stance against Oracle, says Brian Schwartz, an analyst with ThinkEquity, in a note to clients today.

In the negative column, SAP has spent about half of its cash — as of Sept. 30 it had €5 billion ($6.8 billion) in combined cash and short-term investments — to acquire a company that amounts to less than 4 percent of its revenue. SAP will have to struggle to get SuccessFactors to scale up to the point that it moves the needle. Even SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott concedes that it will take awhile, telling Bloomberg News that SuccessFactors could add €1 billion in incremental revenue — by 2015.

Or maybe buy a tiger. Today SAP said it will pay $3.4 billion to acquire SuccessFactors, a cloud-based maker of human-resources software. The deal values SuccessFactors at $40 per share and works out to a premium of about 53 percent. SuccessFactors shares closed at $26.25 a share on Friday. The shares have fallen by more than 9 percent this year, but traded as high as $40.27 a share during 2011.

SuccessFactors’ software is a cloud-based suite of tools around managing various personnel issues in a business: Performance management, goal setting, managing compensation and even planning for succession among senior managers. Its also has a pretty rich set of customers for so small a company: Among them are chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, cable giant Comcast and hedge fund BlackRock. The company has about 15 million active subscription seats, and boasts in its earnings reports about one customer in Europe that has 400,000 users and another in the U.S. with 2 million.

The company reported $205 million in revenue in 2010 and a GAAP loss of $12.5 million, but a 7-cent per-share profit on a non-GAAP basis. It was on track to do $330 million or more in sales in 2011.

What’s it mean for SAP? Basically SuccessFactors gets integrated directly into the SAP Business ByDesign portfolio that McDermott talked about. SAP says in its statement that the deal will be paid for with cash on hand, and by a 1 billion euro loan facility.

The question I have now is this: Is this the starting gun for a new round software acquisitions? There are numerous cloud-based enterprise application companies out there. Among those that come to mind are Netsuite, Taleo, and Workday, to name but a few.

The SAP statement is below.

WALLDORF, Germany and SAN MATEO, Calif. , Dec. 3, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — SAP AG and SuccessFactors, Inc. today announced that SAP’s subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., has entered into a definitive merger agreement with SuccessFactors, the market-leading provider of cloud-based human capital management (HCM) solutions, pursuant to which a subsidiary of SAP would offer to acquire all outstanding shares of common stock of SuccessFactors for $40.00 /per share in cash, representing an enterprise value of approximately $3.4 billion . The acquisition will add SuccessFactors’ widely respected team and technology to SAP’s powerful cloud assets, significantly accelerating SAP’s momentum as a provider of cloud applications, platforms and infrastructure. The combination of SAP and SuccessFactors will establish an advanced end-to-end offering of cloud and on-premise solutions for managing all relevant business processes.

The SuccessFactors board of directors has unanimously approved the transaction. The per share purchase price represents a 52% premium both over the December 2nd closing price and the one month volume weighted average price per share. The transaction will be funded from SAP’s cash on hand and a euro 1 billion term loan facility. The closing of the tender offer is conditioned on SuccessFactors stockholders tendering at least a majority of the outstanding shares of SuccessFactors common stock (on a fully diluted basis) and clearances by relevant regulatory authorities. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2012 and be slightly dilutive to SAP’s Non-IFRS earnings per share in 2012 and accretive in subsequent years.

The acquisition marks another stride in SAP’s strategy of delivering solutions on premise, in the cloud and on mobile devices. It builds on a series of strategic moves in SAP’s targeted growth areas to drive innovation in its core applications and analytics; introduce breakthrough in memory technology; establish leadership in enterprise mobility; and grow its cloud portfolio. SuccessFactors’ solutions are highly complementary to SAP’s core HCM offerings as well as SAP’s strong cloud assets: SAP Business ByDesign for the suite cloud market and SAP’s line of business cloud offerings for large enterprises such as SAP Sales on Demand.

“The cloud is a core of SAP’s future growth, and the combination of SuccessFactors’ leadership team and technology with SAP will create a cloud powerhouse. The acquisition will help us address the top priority for CEOs globally – managing people and talent,” said Bill McDermott , Co-CEO, SAP. “Together, SAP and SuccessFactors will create tremendous business value for customers, with potent synergies to accelerate our growth in the cloud.”

“The depth and experience that SAP brings to customers via our cloud and on-premise portfolio fit elegantly with SuccessFactors’ world-class expertise in providing high-performing, low-cost, native cloud applications that customers are passionate about,” said Jim Hagemann Snabe, Co-CEO, SAP. “Together, we will lead the industry in providing end-to-end solutions consistently to meet any deployment preference, whether on premise, in the cloud or on device.”

“This is a revolutionary combination of proven capabilities that will allow SuccessFactors to accelerate our roadmap by 10 years, and bring the world’s leading application knowledge and intellectual property to our customers through the cloud, and the largest applications customer base instantly,” said Lars Dalgaard , Founder and CEO, SuccessFactors. “Expanding relationships with SAP’s 176,000 customers with our speed to value, friendly user interface, on mobile devices and the web, and seamlessly delivering more SAP solutions in the cloud will be legendary, as organizations adopt the cloud to improve their business. SuccessFactors has proven we have the technology and people to deliver the world’s biggest cloud deployments in terms of users and countries per customer, and also the most applications per customer from the same flexible scalable cloud platform. The business world is ready for enterprise-class cloud applications and together, we can deliver incredible new innovation for global businesses.”

SuccessFactors is believed to operate the largest scale of paying cloud users with 15 million subscription seats. With more than 3,500 customers in 168 countries, SuccessFactors is growing rapidly, recording 77 percent revenue growth year-over-year in the third quarter 2011 and 59 percent revenue growth year-over-year in the first nine months of 2011. SuccessFactors’ scalable cloud application platform supports organizations of all sizes from dozens to millions of users. With proven deployments in SAP environments at companies in diverse industries, the combination of SuccessFactors and SAP holds significant growth potential considering the more than 500 million employees of SAP customers and its 15,000 HCM deployments.

With headquarters in San Mateo, California , and more than 1,450 employees, the SuccessFactors team is widely regarded for creating innovative technology, generating more than 80 percent of new sales from applications that did not exist five years ago, and as one of the fastest growing leaders in cloud applications. Upon completion of the transaction, the CEO of SuccessFactors, Lars Dalgaard , will lead the cloud business of SAP in addition to his responsibility as CEO of SuccessFactors. SuccessFactors will remain independent and be named “SuccessFactors, an SAP company”. The chairman of SAP’s supervisory board, Hasso Plattner , recommended that Lars Dalgaard be appointed to the executive board of SAP AG.

SAP and SuccessFactors Customers to Benefit from Combined Application and Technology Footprint

The combination of SuccessFactors and SAP will create a comprehensive HCM solution, marrying strength in enterprise applications with people-focused cloud applications.
SuccessFactors’ complementary solutions will be an attractive option for more than 500 million employees of SAP customers.
SuccessFactors’ applications are designed for businesses of all sizes, and offer easily adopted solutions for customers of SAP Business Suite, SAP Business ByDesign, SAP Business All-in-One, and SAP Business One.
SuccessFactors’ cloud expertise and know how, rapid cloud innovation and proven success running large scale cloud deployments will help SAP customers more rapidly adopt cloud applications.
SuccessFactors’ mobile applications combined with the mobile expertise of SAP and Sybase will offer customers a powerful business-to-employee mobility portfolio.
SuccessFactors’ focus on enabling business insight and execution fits well with SAP’s business analytics platform, promising new levels of real time decision making across the enterprise.

The main one is Box.net, the red-hot cloud storage and collaboration start-up. Yammer users will now get notifications that new files have been uploaded.

Another Yammer integration that will get attention is Zendesk, the cloud-based help-desk service. If your job involves helping people with their IT troubles, Yammer can publish help-ticket updates as different people work on them.

Expensify is a cloud-based expense-reporting service. I’m not sure I see the point of broadcasting anything about expense reports to coworkers. But if you’re a boss, and you need to do a little public praising and/or shaming around the size of expense reports (or people who file theirs chronically late), then I guess it could make some sense.

TripIt is a cloud-based travel and itinerary management service. The Yammer integration will let you know when a coworker is traveling, about to travel, or has come back from a trip.

The other two: Badgeville, which helps companies create loyalty programs through the creation of Foursquare-like game-and-badge programs; and Spigit, which aims to get employees sharing ideas in order to better “tap into the collective intelligence of an organization.”

These aren’t the first integrations with other services that Yammer has done, and certainly not the last. The first three were NetSuite; Salesforce.com’s Chatter, which was kind of meant to tweak Salesforce a bit; and Microsoft’s SharePoint.

The other piece of news out of Yammer today is that it has debuted something it calls its Activity Stream Ticker, which is a live-streaming side module on the homepage that looks an awful lot like the new activity stream on Facebook. Well, if it looks familiar, that’s because it is based on Facebook’s Open Graph protocol. In fact, Yammer is starting to look less like “Twitter for work” and more like “Facebook for work” all the time. (To see what I mean, click the image below for a bigger screenshot.) You can argue that knowing what music your friends on Facebook are listening to isn’t all that useful. But it might be useful to know who in the office is out on a trip, and who is available for that important meeting.

I talked with Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni, who told me it all comes down to working with the open APIs of pretty much any service. That means there will be a lot more integrations like this.

And it makes perfect sense. While there’s a lot of activity around social enterprise software and collaboration services — Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff can’t stop talking about the subject — Yammer has quietly emerged as the market’s leader, on track to have four million verified corporate users. And last month it landed a $17 million Series D round of funding from the Social+Capital Partnership, a new fund established by former Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya.

Revenue grew by 23 percent year over year to $61 million, while earnings per share on a non-GAAP basis were five cents. The results beat the consensus of analysts by a penny on earnings and $1.5 million on sales — just two of the eight records that NetSuite set in the quarter. Recurring revenue — a key metric that combines both subscriptions and ongoing support — was $51.3 million, also up 23 percent. Cash flow from operations was $9.4 million.

Looking ahead, NetSuite said it expected to earn four cents a share in the current quarter, a penny below the consensus, but that it expects to finish the year with earnings of 15 cents a share, which would be in the upper range of its prior guidance of 13 to 15 cents a share.

NetSuite, which last year did $193 million in sales, has already done $172 million for the first nine months of the year; it said it expects to finish the year with sales in the range of $235.2 million to $235.7 million, slightly ahead of its prior guidance, which topped out at $234 million. It also said it expects sales in the range of $290 million to $300 million.

I had a chance to talk with CEO Zach Nelson about the results and the state of NetSuite’s business. And as usual, he had a lot to say — especially about his biggest competitor, SAP. NetSuite started small, but as its software has grown more complex, its customers have gotten bigger and bigger, lured by the promise that they can not only run their expensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) software cheaper in the cloud than in their own data centers, but do it better.

AllThingsD: Zach, NetSuite is setting records on a lot of fronts this quarter. What’s driving the business? Is it companies swapping other stuff out for yours?

Nelson: In our case, because we do all the back-office stuff, someone is always swapping something out for NetSuite. And what’s changing is the profile of what they’re swapping out. In the old days, when we were getting started, it used to be QuickBooks. Today, it’s SAP and Great Plains and Infor, the very large, midmarket and enterprise ERP. We also set a record for average selling price, and that’s because we keep selling to larger and larger companies.

It’s funny you should mention SAP. I visited with its co-CEO Bill McDermott the other day, and he was talking about SAP’s new cloud-based offerings. What kind of a threat do you see there?

I think when SAP talks about the cloud, it’s enormously helpful to our business. We are the only pure-play cloud-based ERP solution out there. For SAP to be giving it credibility only helps us, because they having nothing to back their claims up other than desire. No traditional software company has successfully made the transition to the cloud, and there are a whole bunch of reasons for that. So it’s great that they’re talking about it. It’s just driving our business more. They have a low-end cloud product called Business ByDesign that doesn’t have much functionality. But we saw more competition from their traditional on-premise product than we did from that. So we’re getting sucked into these deals because SAP is telling the customer they should be looking for a cloud solution, and they really don’t have much to offer in that regard.

You’ve tended to stay away from business functions that aren’t transaction-driven. I’m thinking a little about something like Workday, which does a lot in the human resources area. Do you partner with other companies to shore you up in areas you don’t tend to specialize in?

We have a platform like Salesforce.com does with Force.com. We call it SuiteCloud. So as we go to a lot of these larger companies, it’s important that we augment in areas we haven’t built in, where we don’t have domain expertise. We work with Box.net, for example, on file storage and collaboration, and with SuccessFactors in the human capital management area.

Everyone’s worried about the world economy, especially Europe. Are you?

We aren’t that exposed to Europe. We do some business in the U.K. But Asia has been strong all year. And with regard to the world economy, its important to understand that moving to the cloud is a massive cost reduction for these companies.

You once told me an interesting metric about the costs of on-premise software. It was about how much companies spend to support and run their software.

Every SAP customer I’ve ever talked to tells me that they spend about 2 percent of their revenue getting it running and keeping it running, after you add up all the consultants and other things you need. That’s not just their problem, it’s the customer’s problem. If you’re competing with a company that’s running NetSuite and you’re running on-premise software, you’re at a competitive disadvantage. People are realizing that it’s not just saving them money but it’s also helping them do things better. Disruptive technology doesn’t just help enable you to do the things you’ve always done cheaper than before, but it helps you do them better; and it also helps you do new things that you couldn’t do before. Improving the cost model gets you that 2 percent back, but the real payoff comes from the productivity gains that come on top of that.

Here’s the direct quote taken from the transcript:

“IPhone continues to be adopted as the standard across the enterprise with 93 percent of the Fortune 500 deploying or testing the device, up from 91 percent last quarter and 60 percent of the Global 500 testing or deploying iPhone, up from 57 percent last quarter. A recent example of iPhone’s enterprise success is Lowe’s. Lowe’s is in the process of rolling out over 40,000 iPhones with a custom application to allow their store associates to execute real-time inventory checks, product orders and interactive customers with how-to videos.

Additional examples of companies around the world supporting iPhone on their corporate networks include L’Oreal, Royal Bank of Scotland, SAP, Texas Instruments, Jacobs Engineering Group, Tenet Healthcare, Jaguar Land Rover, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Lincoln National and CSX Corporation. And of course, we’re thrilled to begin shipping iPhone 4S this month.”

And later, a similar section devoted to the iPad:

“Every day, we learn about innovative new ways our enterprise customers are using iPad. The airline industry is a great example of the momentum we’re seeing. United Continental Holdings is putting iPads in every cockpit to replace heavy, paper-based flight bags. In Japan, All Nippon Airways is now using iPad in training programs for flight attendants.

Sonic Automotive is using iPad for customer check-in at the service department and also to provide analytics to regional managers. Aflac, Biogen and General Mills have developed internal apps that their field sales teams leverage daily, and technicians of Siemens Energy are bringing iPads along when they do maintenance work at the top of their wind turbines.”

It turns out that it’s not a new thing, exactly. Cook has recited similar lists on Apple conference calls before. But as recently as 2008, when Businessweek published its cover story called “The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit” (which, full disclosure, I worked on), Apple was generally considered an outsider in the enterprise IT business, and Apple products a novelty in the office. In broad brushstrokes, Macs tended to show up at media and advertising companies, and in the creative and marketing departments of other companies. The iPhone, and later the iPad, changed all that.

Here’s about as good an indication of that trend as I’ve ever seen: Intermedia, a company that operated a hosted Microsoft Exchange service for small and mid-sized businesses, said earlier this month that among its 41,000 customers, 78 percent are using Apple devices to get their mail, contact lists and calendars.

Meanwhile, look at all the companies that have developed enterprise applications for iOS: Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Citrix immediately come to mind. And Tidemark — the business intelligence start-up I wrote about yesterday — is iPad-ready from the start. There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of examples I’m missing.

Apple has cumulatively sold 40 million iPads since the device launched last year. The company doesn’t offer much in the way of a data breakdown of how many of those are sold to businesses, but it almost doesn’t matter, because in so many cases, people buy one and just take it to the office. When you hear the phrase “consumerization of IT,” which already feels pretty worn out to me, it refers mostly to people who want to use iOS devices at work, and to a lesser extent, Google’s Android. A recent survey of 750 IT managers found that the iPhone led the pack of personal devices used at work, followed by Android Phones and the iPad.

I probably shouldn’t be surprised by all this, but when I heard Tim Cook list all those big companies using iThings to get things done, it finally dawned on me: Apple is as much an enterprise story as it is a consumer story.