The Microsoft result was cited by an analyst during yesterday's NetSuite earnings conference call. NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson, usually fond of bashing the Bellevue, Wash.-based competitor, was unusually restrained when he dismissed Microsoft for not having any true cloud products in the ERP space. However, he resumed form when someone asked him whether SAP's cloud product, Business ByDesign was having any competitive impact. "It's the David Hasselhoff of software; it's big in Germany," the generally quick-witted Nelson replied. He pictured ByD as being less of a competitor to NetSuite than it had been in the prior quarter and suggested there was less than meets the eye to the customer numbers SAP handed out for ByD this week. But even off a small base, those 60-percent figures suggest the cloud channel business is ballooning and a bit more of that in the next two quarters and would certainly be talking about real money.