While Salesforce.com's the unquestioned SaaS revenue leader, Taleo, RightNow, NetSuite and SuccessFactors are all closing in on annual run rates of $200 million. With SuccessFactors this week reporting 27% quarterly revenue growth to $46.8 million, these and other high-growth SaaS vendors have proven they've got industrial-strength enterprise chops.

Cloud computing will save the U.S. government quite a bit of money and improve its efficiency, no doubt, but until government officials are convinced of its security, the migration to this new computing paradigm is likely to be a slow one. As the delayed deployment of the Los Angeles police department’s new Google (GOOG) email system illustrates, the threat of unknown security risks far outweighs the 25 to 50 percent savings in IT costs that the Brookings Institution claims U.S. agencies can save by moving to cloud computing.

So Google’s announcement Monday that its Apps for Government cloud-based productivity suite had gained certification under the Federal Information Security Management Act was quite a win for the company. In theory, that seal of approval will instill in government a modicum of confidence in the security and reliability of the cloud-computing model.

According to Gartner, SaaS revenue in the enterprise application software market will exceed $8.5 billion this year. The economic benefits that are brought on through the adoption of SaaS are said to be the major driving factor in SaaS revenue growth.

“The popularity of SaaS has increased significantly within the past five years. Initial concerns about security, response time and service availability have diminished for many organisations, as SaaS business and computing models have matured and adoption has become more widespread”, said Sharon Mertz, Research Director at Gartner.

It’s becoming quite clear the growing familiarity with the SaaS platform and the demand for more cost effective IT solutions have really opened the door for SaaS to make the big splash that it has.

ServiceCEO a leading provider of field service management software, today announced that Q2 2010 revenue for its software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution grew 42% percent over Q1 2010.

In the quarter ending June 30, 2010, 86 new field service businesses selected the web-based SaaS solution to help maximize productivity and billable hours and minimize time spent on paperwork and scheduling. During the quarter, more than 100,000 jobs - representing over $20 million in field service revenues - were booked, scheduled, and managed using the software.

Orbit Software, a leading software solutions provider of Transportation Management with a track record of providing comprehensive and sophisticated school bus routing software packages, today announced the SaaS version product release of its’ bus routing and scheduling solution – BusBoss Professional.

BusBoss SaaS is a comprehensive, scalable, on-demand, feature-rich Transportation Management solution that helps increase both productivity and efficiency, and reduce expenses with no software to install, no hardware to set-up and no headaches.

Non-profit, StayClassy provides innovative social fundraising SaaS that helps the 1.5 million US non-profits compete in the $308 billion giving industry.

Non-profits need to raise funds in order to finance their operations. StayClassy is designed to help them do just that with a full-featured online platform for fundraising that also includes social media tie-ins to help organizations get the word out.

Cloud computing has been described as a technological change brought about by the convergence of a number of new and existing technologies. The promise of cloud computing is identified primarily by the following key technical characteristics:

• The ability to create the illusion of infinite capacity performance is the same if scaled for one or one hundred or one thousand users with consistent service-level characteristics.
• Abstraction of the infrastructure so applications are not locked into devices or locations.
• Pay-as-you-go usage of the IT service; you only pay for what you use, with no or minimal up-front investment costs. You typically just use the service through a connection and device.
• Service is on-demand and able to scale up and down with near instant availability. Typically, no forward planning forecast is required.
• Access to applications and information can be obtained from any access point.

But this is only half the story. These technical characteristics can also be found in many non-disruptive technology solutions. What sets the promise of cloud computing apart is that the rate of change, magnitude of cost reduction and specific technical performance impact that cloud computing can provide is not just incremental, but can give a five-to-ten times order of magnitude of improvement.

Plateau Systems, a leading provider of enterprise-class SaaS solutions for talent management, has announced Plateau Foundation, the talent management industry’s first platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution, allowing customers to implement specific extensions to the Plateau Talent Management Suite to address their specific business requirements.

According to Heath Williams, vice president of international sales at Plateau: “In Europe, we’re finding that customers are looking for talent management solutions that are easily adaptable to their specific business requirements. It is only now, as technological advances are made, that software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions – such as Plateau Foundation - have the functional breadth and flexibility that they need in order to build and keep their competitive advantage in terms of corporate knowledge and skills.

Etouches, a web‐based SaaS provider that caters to event organizers, has raised an undisclosed amount of venture capital funding from a group of investors led by Greycroft Partners II (the firm started by iconic VC Alan Patricof ).

Etouches started out 12 years ago as a self-funded, independent meeting planning company, but has since transitioned into a full-fledged software company offering a suite of integrated event management and marketing tools designed to implement and support every phase of the event lifecycle. The product is said to currently serve over 2,000 event programs all around the world annually, and is available in 27 languages.