As CEO of NetSuite, Zach Nelson knows a thing or two about cloud computing. After all, his company was born in the cloud way back in 1998 — before it became fashionable — and it’s been all-cloud ever since, offering ERP and other business software as a service by subscription.

“We were effectively the first cloud app,” Nelson said in a recent interview. “The idea was to build a system to run a business, and oh by the way, deliver it over the Internet.”

Originally, the company was known as NetLedger. Today, it has plenty of company in the cloud.

Not only have a raft of other cloud-first startups arrived, but traditional vendors of on-premises business software also have been racing to the cloud with new and retooled offerings for enterprise resource planning, e-commerce, customer relationship management and more.

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