InfoWorld writes in a special report:
SaaS ecosystems are emerging, such as the on-demand, SOA-based platform developed by Rearden Commerce, which connects business customers with travel, shipping, and other service providers through identity-based Web apps. And then theres Salesforce.coms (Profile, Products, Articles) exciting new AppExchange platform, which offers a hosted space for sharing Salesforce.com-based apps that the company calls an iTunes for business applications.
All this activity, however, doesnt mean the SaaS wave is poised to engulf traditional licensed software. SaaSs share of the business application market today is more like a drop in the bucket. And enterprises have been slow to embrace SaaS, raising objections over reliability and availability, underscored by recent Salesforce.com outages.
Yet the arrival of the big enterprise-software guns, the emergence of integrated business communities in the cloud, and increasing desperation on the part of IT to minimize application deployment and maintenance hassles, suggest that SaaS is on the verge of much faster adoption.
