Salesforce.com, long the poster child for Sun Microsystem's software-as-a-service business, is ditching Sun's hardware and Solaris software for machines from Dell running the Linux operating system.

The Register reports: "The move comes as Salesforce.com prepares to bring up a new data center in Singapore to serve its SaaS platform, which now supports 43,600 customers. The center is based entirely on Dell from the start, while the older centers are being migrated."

Computing power is increasingly a commodity business, even at the mission-critical level. Interesting to see how vendor efforts to buck that tide play out.