However, the only way for SaaS providers to succeed as a viable alternative to traditional desktop applications is to ensure they deliver reliable performance and scale of their services.

Content delivery network operator Akamai Technologies (akamai.com) offers a Web application acceleration solution for secure and reliable application acceleration that enables SaaS providers to deliver services to any enterprise regardless of their size and geographic distribution. The solution also enables enterprises to reduce expensive operating costs related to IT build-out and performance-related service complaints.

"The area we're seeing a lot of activity in is accelerating software as a service," says Neil Cohen, senior manager of Akamai application performance solutions product marketing. "You can use an Akamai managed service to leverage our global network to do that. Not only that, architecturally, there are advantages to accelerating your applications end to end, as opposed to just accelerating your applications in the data center."

As companies extend their business models with SaaS offerings, Akamai has seen significant growth in its customer base. The company has seen more than a five-fold increase in the amount of global application traffic delivered on behalf of SaaS providers from January 2006 to January 2007.

The growing list of clients include Satuit Technologies, Autodesk and SaaS Showplace, as well as a joint venture with Verizon Business, providing a combined offering for enterprises leveraging SaaS.

"You can think of companies that are developing software and now have to deliver that software as a service to users all over the world," says Cohen. "Akamai gives you a way of accelerating that software as a service with on-demand applications to users all over the world, so regardless of where you are, you feel like you're close to a data center.

Many of Akamai customers deliver their applications to users in over 100 countries, using the Web Application Accelerator service to take advantage of the company's globally-deployed platform to deliver consistent, improved application performance for SaaS consumers worldwide.

Akamai recently added a series of new features and enhancements to its managed services offering for accelerating Web-based enterprise applications, which existing customers will receive free of charge and without the burden of software or hardware upgrades.

The new features include enhanced pre-fetching capabilities, strategic global deployments, real-time application performance reporting and pre-defined integrations for the acceleration of SAP, Oracle and IBM WebSphere Portal applications.

But perhaps the most important enhancement is that it has improved its service level agreement, assuring 100 percent network availability. It achieves this by applying its proprietary SureRoute algorithms to avoid Internet trouble-spots. 

"Everybody talks about making applications faster," says Cohen. "But they don't always talk about making your applications more available because no one can control the Internet like Akamai."