Traditional Web Hosts Move Upstream

With the announcement of Microsoft's SaaS Incubation program launching in North America, we'll start to see the traditional hosting companies begin to emulate what companies like OpSource have been doing for awhile. What I'm most interested in, is seeing how each of these platforms take shape and which host will be the first to begin moving down a path of on-demand SaaS application publishing into their environments. To an extent, this is a good opportunity for all of the participants in this program to come together and begin discussing how to make it easier and standard for an on-demand platform -- all the way from designers that a SaaS ISV can publish manifests through to define their "world" within the infrastructure to SDKs that allow SaaS ISVs to tie directly into a variety of services offered by the SaaS hosters.

I think it's important for these new SaaS hosting players to realize that bringing on an ISV is more than simply providing equipment and pipe. Those companies who believe that SaaS is simply a new moniker for offering dedicated servers are wrong. Just like web hosting, you need to provide a platform for these applications to sit in, on-behalf-of services to tie into, and a method of managing and publishing new applications or application updates into the environment -- these are only a few things a true on-demand SaaS platform needs.

Those companies that can work with each other to develop a standardized method of publishing applications into a hosting platform, bringing on-demand SaaS hosting into reality, will, I believe, help strengthen the overall SaaS industry as more and more ISVs look toward SaaS or S+S as the next evolution for their businesses.