Talkin’ Cloud has come up with its yearly Talkin’ Cloud 100, comprising a century of cloud’s best and brightest players. And, in a fiercely competitive field, it was Salesforce.com who came out on top of this year’s list.

Salesforce beat Amazon into the silver medal position, with Microsoft, Oracle and Google completing the top five.

Admittedly, it says something about the strength of the ecosystem where SAP (6th) didn’t make the top five and Workday (11th) the top 10. Terremark, Rackspace and NetSuite came 8th, 9th and 10th respectively, with SoftLayer finishing 7th.

For SoftLayer of course, now read IBM – a fact the researchers acknowledged which cropped up during the writing of the report.

“Amid all that activity, it’s clear that VARs (value added resellers) and MSPs (managed service providers) have warmed up to cloud computing, rather than fearing disintermediation,” the report notes, concluding: “Overall …