Blah Blah from The TeaBreak Team.

GigaOM has good commentary about the trends in cloud computing and how SAAS is growing up and strengthening the cloud computing model. This is also a validation of the online/offline collaboration model which is being made popular by Google Apps and the availability of economically priced Netbooks (priced around $300) which are a great replacement for laptops for many users.

The next generation of highly successful software as a service (SaaS) companies will likely focus on delivering collaboration and IT management, according to a report out today from Forrester Research. The report takes a look at the SaaS infrastructure and lays out the case for continued SaaS adoption among certain groups of applications (see chart).

What caught my eye, though, was that professional services firms were building up support for various SaaS applications such as Safesforce.com and GoogleApps. As such an ecosystem develops around software as a service, it’s clear to me that the phenomenon, which essentially requires trusting a service based in the cloud, heralds the eventual acceptance of actual cloud computing, where IT infrastructure is delivered from the cloud. Because, if a business is already exporting its proprietary customer information to outside providers, its servers won’t be too far behind — especially in this economic environment.