What a great morning here at the Hosting Summit.  Highlights from the presentations accross all is that SaaS or S+S is no longer just hype but a business reality. Particularly for the hosting provider business this is both a challenge as much (or maybe even more) a super opportunity.

I'm not surprised as my day to day work is all about getting the ISVs connected with the hosters. The Incubation Center program is all about that. Greg Urquhart from the MS US ISV team called out this number of 60% of the ISVs looking at hosters as the partner to move to a SaaS model. And I believe that's a number that is even bigger in some of the International markets.

Another 2 great announcements are about Softgrid 4.5 coming to SPLA in the fall, finally I want to say. I have seen many partners look at Softgrid as a tool to move apps into the hosting infrastructure without changing the core of the app.

Another announcement is related to the SQL 2008 Web Edition, at a low (very low) pricepoint this will be a definately serious alternative for smaller, start-up ISVs that will help to match the cost base with the maturity of their business. The good part here is that scaling the requirements up to a clustered, high available solution will be much more seamless than moving from a free database technology when you get out of prototyping or grow as a business into a higher SLA requirement.

Hosters need to move up the valuechain if they want to survive and increase the margins and not get hit by the 'Gorrila's' (fun pun from John Zanni's pres today calling that collective 'amazooglesoft') :-)

I noticed a lot of interest from both the hosters present, as well as the technology vendors at the event, in what Microsoft is doing with the Incubation Center program. It appears to strike some of the right chords where it comes to assiting ISVs with the business challenges of moving to SaaS.