Customer service software provider Salesforce.com (News - Alert) purchased Jigsaw recently for $142 million in "an acquisition that seems to have actual content," and not just a way for Salesforce.com "to spend some of that half billion they put together."

That's the opinion of CRM guru Paul Greenberg, one of the small handful of genuinely must-read CRM observers and a man to whom the New York Yankees' 2009 season was "oh, acceptable. But we'll do better this year."

Greenberg says to think "partnership with VMWare" about the Jigsaw deal: "The combination of the two tells me that Salesforce.com is making an effort to become not just a PaaS provider, born a CRM provider, but now a complete cloud offering."

[Editor's Note: We wish to thank Dave for manfully resisting the urge to write 'Jigsaw Big Piece of the Puzzle for Salesforce.com' as the headline.]

The partnership with VMWare is going to provide Infrastructure as a Service, Greenberg thinks: "I guess we'll find out something more on this April 27 or 28 when Salesforce.com announces "Vmforce," [or] the name of whatever the partnership of VMWare and Salesforce.com is going to deliver."

Yet he still sees Storage as a Service as "a missing component." To some degree, maybe, the multitenant architecture of Salesforce.com could provide it, Greenberg says, but wonders "what about apps that may be cloud based or data that doesn't reside in a Salesforce.com data store?  A document for example? A gazillion lines of code waiting to be compiled?"

In sum, Greenberg says, "this seems to be an attempt by Salesforce.com to do what they've been promising since 2003 -- to be the 'Business Web,' the cute term which seems so archaic and arcane now, for the place where a business would run all of its business needs."

In fact he finds the Jigsaw purchase to be "far more serious than their continued announcements of Sales Cloud 2, Service Cloud 2, Custom Cloud 2 and Chatter as the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th 'clouds.'"

He concludes by saying "I have to say that this seems to be a smart move by our always interesting buds at Salesforce.com. With that, I don't see how they are going to compete yet with Amazon or Microsoft (News - Alert) Azure yet because I don't know how they are going to price a cloud offering, I don't know what they are thinking when it comes to the storage components and I don't know if I'm even right that this is what they're thinking."