When it comes to cloud computing, data is the once and future king. While most of the cloud computing focus for the last four years has been in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), traditional enterprise IT vendors have figured out the best chance they have to thwart the ambitions of rivals is to leverage all the data they have access to inside their applications.

All things being relatively equal when it comes to cloud platforms, the most important factor in deciding where to host that application is access to data. After all, building an application is one thing. But that application is only as valuable as the data it contains. What Salesforce.com, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and IBM have figured out is they already have a lot of the critical data that developers are looking for within their application environment.

In fact, the politics of data in the cloud is driving some strange bedfellow behavior. Salesforce.com, in theory, competes head to head with both Oracle and Microsoft. But with the launch of Salesforce1 it became clear that Salesforce.com is building an application platform around its customer relationship management (CRM) application. Developers can more easily leverage the data in Salesforce.com if they build their applications on cloud platforms where Salesforce.com resides. In fact, Salesforce.com is now the provider of one of the fastest growing environments in the cloud.

Recognizing the need to have a critical mass of data in the cloud lead first to Oracle signing a cloud alliance with Salesforce.com. That was quickly followed up by an alliance with Microsoft to integrate Salesforce1 with Microsoft Office 365 and Windows environments running on Microsoft Azure.

Meanwhile, SAP is signaling its intent to leverage the data from SAP Financials, SuccessFactors, Ariba and other applications to attract developers to the SAP HANA in-memory computing cloud. At the SAP Sapphire Now 2014 conference, SAP Platform Solutions Group president Steve Lucas said that as far being able to achieve critical data mass in the cloud, the company’s competitors could “eat it.”

Similarly, IBM has been building out a CloudMix platform, through which it will eventually make the billions of dollars it has invested in acquiring applications available.

All of these efforts are intended to combat the critical mass of applications that Amazon already has running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Developers intrinsically know if their applications are to have any value, they need to have access to data that resides in other applications. It’s a whole lot easier to accomplish that integration when the applications they build reside within the same cloud computing environment as the applications they need to share data with are located.

When it comes to cloud applications, location matters because the laws of physics still apply. The easier it is to call data residing in another application, the faster the cloud application runs. Given all the inherent latencies associated with running any application in the cloud, developers don’t want their applications to hang waiting for calls being made via RESTful application programming interfaces.

As the conversation starts to move away from platforms to the actual amount of relevant data that resides in your cloud environment, the bigger the investment needed to succeed becomes. All this means that when it comes to be able to compete in the cloud era, service providers that don’t have access to a vibrant ecosystem of data soon are going to find themselves at a very serious disadvantage.