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.