The broader SaaS market (I would include PaaS and Cloud Computing) have been really interesting this year and here are some of the notable news items that have caught my attention over the past couple of months:

Mergers & Acqusitions

SuccessFactors buys CubeTree for $50M… Interesting move into the collaboration space

IBM buys CastIron … Nice compliment to their Cloud Infrastructure offerings.  Is Boomi next?

… then IBM buys CoreMetrics.

Salesforce.com buys JigSaw for $142M! … Surprised that they would pay up for a content company.

CA buys Nimsoft for $350M … gets into the SaaS infrastructure management market.  Good company.

SAP buys Sybase for $5.8B …  not sure about this one?  A diversion to deflect attention away from BBD?

RedPrairie buys SmartTurn … traditional SCM provider begins their move to SaaS.

VMWare looking at EngineYard … interesting since Amazon funded this Ruby-on-Rails PaaS startup.

Fundings & IPO’s

Marketing Automation: Marketo raises $10M Series D, led by Mayfield.

Enterprise Collaboration: Yammer raises $10M Series B, led by Emergence Capital.

Financial Analytics:  Host Analytics raises $15M Series C, led by Next World Capital.

Cloud Business Intelligence:  Cloud9 Analytics raises $8M Series C, led by Mayfield.

Recent SaaS/Cloud IPO’s include Convio, SPS Commerce and Financial Engines.

New Products and Launches

Broadvision launches Clearvale … Ning for the enterprise.

Plateau launches PaaS platform for Talent Management

Mercer partners with PeopleClick Authoria, first combination of HR consulting content with Talent Management technology platform

VMware and Force.com partner, launch VMForce.

Lawson launches ERP Cloud offering on Amazon AWS … too little, too late?

Recently Profiled SaaS Companies by Montclair Advisors

Birst, CentralDesktop, Cloud9 Analytics, GoodData, Marketo, Netsuite and WOLF Frameworks.

There are definitely a lot going on in the SaaS and Cloud Computing markets and we will continue to cover newsworthy events and profile leading players throughout 2010.

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Company:            Cloud9 Analytics

Started:                2007

Located:               Redwood City, California

Geography:          Global

Market:                 On-Demand Performance Management Solutions for Sales

Products:              Cloud9 Pipeline Accelerator Suite and Cloud9 Analyst Suite.

Key Customers: Aspect, Avaya, Beckman Coulter, Inc., Carestream Health, Inc., D&B, Jigsaw, MySpace, Rolls-Royce, Schneider Electric, Siemens Enterprise Communications, Splunk, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Thomson Reuters Healthcare

Website:               Cloud9 Analytics

Community:         Cloud9 User Community

Twitter:                @Cloud9Analytics

Recent News:

Cloud9 Achieves Breakout Performance in 2009

Karen M. Steele Joins Cloud9 Analytics as Vice President, Marketing

Cloud9 Analytics Integrates Goals, Bookings and Sales Data For salesforce.com Customers

Cloud9 Announces Major Business Expansion - Large organizations accelerating adoption of Cloud9 solutions

I asked Swayne Hill, Cloud9 Analytics CEO a few questions about his business and his view of the SaaS market in 2010.

Did you start out as a Software-as-a-Service company?

Yes, from its inception, Cloud9 has been a 100% multi-tenant platform for performance management applications like sales pipeline management and forecasting. The company is also SAS-70 certified.

Why do your customers buy from Cloud9?

Cloud9 Analytics provides SaaS performance management applications designed for customer-facing front office functions including sales, operations, marketing, services and support. Cloud9 solutions help companies optimize revenue by providing real-time visibility into what’s changed in key management processes such as managing the sales pipeline or managing the forecast.  Cloud9 solutions deliver sales leaders and executives with actionable insight into the state of their business with a single, consistent and flexible view.  Unlike other business intelligence tools designed for the IT department to build Ad Hoc reports, Cloud9 provides domain-specific analytic applications delivered through a software subscription, that are immediately relevant and consumable for line-of-business users. Using Cloud9 solutions, customers report increased win rates and forecast accuracy leading directly to increased revenue.

What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?

As Cloud Computing platforms such as Salesforce’s Force.com, Amazon AWS, Google’s App Engine, Intuit’s IPP and others emerge for Cloud Computing development, there will be greater opportunity for ISVs to provide solutions and broaden their reach.

What is your outlook for 2010?

Cloud9 sees continued rapid expansion of SaaS business analytics, driven by trends like:

Technology: Smarter automation support for key management processes that are currently bogged down by today’s disconnected manual approaches.

Data Transparency: Businesses need to stem the flow of disappearing data from transactional systems like CRM and put that data to work on the front lines.

Economic Turnaround: The economy will expand again and business will invest in technology that creates competitive advantage - SaaS will become the model of choice with minimal upfront costs and quick time-to-value.