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This article presents an interview of two executives from hosted applications or on-demand software service providers. Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.corn, elucidated his expectations for the hosted-application paradigm. Benioff thinks that the resurgence of interest in the hosted model was driven by exciting feature of the on-demand model. He added that the hosted model offers a whole breadth of opportunity for the customer to be more successful than ever before, using a whole new model at very low costs and very easy to use. Yet, chief information officers must not be worried because their job is going to be more strategic and more about finding what right thing to do for the business, and less about managing databases. Meanwhile, Grand Central Communications CEO Halsey Minor extolled the virtues of sharing. Minor said that enterprises need to change the way they consume applications. Consider spending $100 million on an enterprise software and get nothing back. Sifting to the hosted or on-demand application reduces this risk and the costs. As for the services of Grand Central, Minor said that there is no upfront on the cost of its platforms. He pointed out that theirs is the only platform that lets clients share their Internet protocol.

This article focuses on the objection to the software as a service (SaaS) strategy. The main core of this objection is that reliability and availability are in the service provider's hands. One sample is the service disruptions experienced by Salesforce.com customers in December 2005 and January 2006. In line with this outages, the company launched a running accounts and history of system status at trust.salesforce.com. Nonetheless, some customers cancelled their subscription, not only because of the outage but also because of the so-called repeated system slowdowns.