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.