It is no surprise to see NetSuite boss Zach Nelson heavily backing the cloud – it is after all where his company is routed – but at a recent event in London he laid into his "shrinking" on-premise rivals and attacked the "classic propaganda" of anti-cloud sentiment.

The event was held to push the company’s message about the cloud to a group of customers, press and analysts as well as announce the launch of a localised version of its OpenAir technology, which CBR covered here.

Nelson had already marked his visit to London by claiming that "in 10 years we’ll be bigger than SAP" and followed that up dismissing a number of other rivals.

The CEO of a could-based company is obviously going to back the delivery model so should we really read anything into his comments? The figures don’t really back up his claim… yet.

For 2009 NetSuite recorded revenue of $166.5m with a net loss of $23.3m. SAP, seemingly Nelson’s main target, recorded revenue of Euro10.67bn and net income of Euro1.80bn. But where Nelson’s claim starts to make sense is that NetSuite’s revenue for 2009 was up 9% while SAP’s was down 8%.

CBR spoke to Nelson earlier this year, and he told us then that SAP had "underestimated" what it would take to succeed in cloud computing. "I think at the highest level they underestimated what it took to build a product like NetSuite – which is what they’re trying to do with Business ByDesign. From all indications the first iteration was not very good, once they build the product they then have to deliver it on the Internet rather than ship it to the client on a disk. You then have to sell to the midmarket and SAP’s entire sales model is built on big deals, $3m rather than $30,000," he told us.

Nelson built on that idea at the London event: "Those not embracing cloud – Sage, SAP and Microsoft – are shrinking. Customers are not betting on [their business model]. Now the genie is out of the bottle and there is no stopping it," he said.

Gartner also believes there is no stopping cloud computing. The analyst house recently predicted that worldwide cloud services revenue would reach $68.3bn in 2010, an increase of 16.6% compared to 2009. That figure would rise to $148.8bn in 2014.

However, "many enterprises may be examining cloud computing and cloud services, but are far from convinced that it is appropriate for their requirements," noted Ben Pring, research vice president at Gartner.

Nelson accepts that there are issues to overcome with cloud computing, but also took the time to dispel some of the "myths" about it.

"Some say you can’t run complex processes in the cloud – but it makes it easier than the old client-server. Some say customisation is the cloud’s Achilles heel – that’s not true. Once you’ve customised you can migrate. No one wants to touch a client-server after customisation for fear that it’ll blow up or be too expensive to do again. You don’t need to re-do anything when you upgrade your app. It’s the cloud’s killer feature. Finally the idea that there is no channel in the cloud is classic propaganda," he said.

"The cloud is built on modern technology; it’s designed with the Internet in mind, not technology that is 20 years old," Nelson concluded. "Cloud is the last computing architecture."