Dec. 23--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."

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.

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

Tien Tzou, chief executive of Zuora, said he saved between half a million to one million dollars when he launched the online payments and billing company last May by only using cloud services. "We have no servers," Tzou said. "We run our entire business in the cloud."

Among the services Zuora subscribes to are CVSDude, which tracks software development projects; Google Apps, which can be used to create and share documents, videos and project-specific Web sites; and Salesforce, to manage sales leads and marketing campaigns.

Zuora itself specializes in providing billing for companies using the cloud. Tzou, a former chief marketing officer for Salesforce.com, watched Salesforce build its own billing solution and thought it might be helpful to offer billing as a stand-alone cloud service. Tzou said he already has 50 customers.