After being criticized for being slow to the cloud computing race, Microsoft has launched a full-scale cloud computing offensive.

At the company’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, D.C., this week it made a number of announcements on the cloud computing front, including a new Azure appliance and a new application marketplace for users of its Microsoft Dynamics CRM software.

Salesforce.com wants you to know that it is much more than a source of SaaS customer relationship management tools. With the launch of Microsoft Azure looming, Salesforce is making a big pitch as a cloud computing heavyweight.

The announcements came at a rapid clip at the company's annual Dreamforce Conference this week in San Francisco. Salesforce boasted that its Force.com cloud development platform has been used by CIOs and IT departments to build more than 135,000 applications. It also pointed to a white paper from IDC that says companies can develop tools four- to five-times faster on Salesforce's cloud platform than creating them on-premise -- and at half the cost.