Came across an interesting article from Paul Gillin, who does a great job of explaining a very powerful platform – the Serena Mashup Exchange – in a few simple words.

As I look at the amount of automation we have in place around the Mashup Exchange, the systems powering it, and how we’ve been able to “glue” these systems together for real business value and results, technological progress becomes apparent. SaaS is real, and has real benefits, and the move to SaaS represents another evolutionary step in enbracing the power of the web.

I’m currently attending the Metamorphosis 8.0 show in San Jose today, where we’re hearing about Integration generally. This is another crucial ingredient in the evolution of SaaS – and Pervasive seems to have a great story  – 150 integration adapters that can connect to a SaaS system. More on that later.

We’ve been hard at work on the Serena Mashup Exchange, which will go into a live beta April 2nd at MashupExchange.com. If you’re really, really curious, you can see the unpublished alpha here. There are a few major UI tweaks that we’ll roll out in a few days, as well as upload some additional mashups and web services during the beta period.

We’ve also started to get some cred from blogs like Dennis Howlett’s Enterprise Alley at ZDNet, talking about our platform, HiveLive. We chose HiveLive because their SaaS platform is uniquely tailored to our goals – i.e. we want to enable people to interact with each other, and have the data be a scondary considerations – an artifact of their interaction rather than the focus!

It may seem like a nit, but it’s a true difference between their platform and others. Nothing shows this more than when you attempt to set up data types on HiveLive. Several other vendors we examined in this area wanted 30+k in consulting to simply create a new posting type – let’s say a mashup listing data type which has a zip file containing the actual mashup, a few text fields with descriptions, some images, a video etc. – all of which is a “Mashup Listing”. In other systems, the data types are at the center of the application, and are not easily modified, whereas in HiveLive the people are the center, and data types are easily modified around people’s needs.

Simply put, this means a much more relevant system that saves us thousands of dollars and enables much deeper self-serve configuration rather than customization, which is the bane of all implementation efforts.

I am sitting in salesforce.com’s partner conference right now. They just went through some great coverage about where they are working, where the opportunity is for partners, and where salesforce.com intends to build. They were open about what they were doing, and that is a great thing for partners, who want to make safe investments.

They also highlighted some interesting cases where salesforce has sold nearly 40,000 seats to a Japanese firm, but not for the CRM – but rather for the platform!

Which brings up another point: they are redubbing the platform as “the force.”

Good branding. Now if they could only change their ticker

All that ribbing aside,  SaaS is going through an inflection. Business Objects’ Steven Lucas last night at the “after dark” party said that they have reached 50k subscribers, which is a big amount of recent growth. Salesforce’ platform sale is a huge unprecedented event.

So all that makes me more excited than ever about Mashups and the Mashup Exchange.

And if you’re looking for funding, look to Emergence Capital, a 5-year old VC that is tightly focused on SaaS, and is looking to invest in “technology-enabled-service” which includes BPO’s, information services companies, and SaaS.  They are looking for people to build standalone companies, and are asking themselves the question: when will the force platform be ready for people to build on it?

Things are heating up.