There’s nothing nebulous about Salesforce.com’s success in peddling cloud computing solutions. The San Francisco-based company is anticipating revenue of about $2 billion in fiscal 2012, which ends in January.

“After taking a decade to achieve our first billion dollar year in fiscal 2009, we believe that our strong growth this year will allow us to deliver approximately $2 billion in revenue in fiscal 2012, making Salesforce.com the first cloud computing company to achieve that milestone,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO Salesforce.com, in a press release.

Results for Salesforce.com’s fiscal third quarter include total revenue of $429 million, an increase of 30 percent on a year-over-year basis. Subscription and support revenues reached $403 million, an increase of 31 percent on a year-over-year basis. And professional services and other revenues hit the $26 million mark, an increase of 10 percent on a year-over-year basis.

Salesforce.com’s meteoric rise over the past 10 years stems from one of the fastest-growing Web industries: cloud computing. Cloud computing lets enterprises and government agencies rent additional storage space and processing power over the Internet, eliminating the need for companies to spend millions of dollars on high-priced servers.

Once the exclusive domain of government agencies and research labs, cloud computing is now widely considered a mainstream alternative to in-house storage and data processing. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are only a handful of industry stalwarts that have jumped on the cloud computing bandwagon. These are now joined by a bevy of smaller cloud computing players, including GoGrid, Nirvanix and The Planet.

In fact, Gartner, Inc., predicts that by 2012, 80 percent of Fortune 1000 enterprises will pay for some cloud-computing service, while 30 percent of them will pay for cloud-computing infrastructure.

There are drawbacks to cloud computing including privacy and security concerns. But these factors haven’t stopped Salesforce.com from winning over loyal customers. According to the company’s third-quarter results, net paying customers rose approximately 4,800 during the quarter. The number of total net paying customers at the end of the fiscal third quarter was approximately 87,200.

Edited by Tammy Wolf