On Demand: Hosting Model SpreadsOn Demand: Hosting Model Spreads

The utility-computing approach, especially when offered by hosting companies, has proven popular with one segment of the IT industry: companies selling software applications as a service, sometimes called application service providers. One of the areas of greatest activity is within the customer-relationship-management market, where Salesforce.com Inc. has been grabbing market share by offering on-demand CRM services as a hosted service.

The success of Salesforce has driven others in the CRM industry to work with hosting companies to create their own hosted platforms. Siebel Systems Inc. is working with IBM on a subscription service, and Kana Inc. is working with Jamcracker Inc., another service provider that offers what it calls an On-Demand Delivery Platform.

Kana recently introduced two products using Jamcracker's hosting services: Response Live, a Web-collaboration tool, and Kana Response, a response-management system. In the past, those products would have been sold to a customer and installed at the customer's site. Now they're offered as a service.

By using Jamcracker, Kana didn't have to build its own administration system, says Brian Kelly, executive VP of products for Kana, saving as much as a year in design and development and cutting the need to add staff in its IT department.

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