I was following up on some coverage Sugar’s CEO Larry Augustin has received in the press and from the bloggers following that press. Larry has noted that the true cloud-powered solutions that are coming up are replacing (or at least evolving) the notions we have around SaaS. A nice distillation can be found here at Ben Krepes’ blog.

I agree and disagree with the notion that the Open Cloud will “kill” SaaS. I mean, it took a decade for SaaS to emerge as a truly viable alternative to client/server…and cloud will take some time to catch on as well. But the great thing is, that some levels of cloud-powered apps are very similar to what the old multi-tenant SaaS apps offer – so the competition has already begun for that piece of the application pie.

Continues @ CRM Outsiders Blog Archive Beyond SaaS, Beyond PaaS – the SugarCRM Open Cloud.