One of these areas that were always good candidates to go SaaS was MS-Exchange. After all, unlike ERP or CRM that can be better on the web but can work 100% on premise, emails rely on the web to function. Web based mail has been around for more than a decade starting with personal mail services (Hotmail, Yahoo, Google...) that are hugely successful. In the past few years companies started offering virtual exchange services, and at the same time Google and Yahoo invested in business mail and calendar services to get a chunk of this market.

With Cisco buying PostPath it sounds like this market may heat even further. The link between mail, calendar, and online meetings is very clear: Cisco-WebEx will be able to add real value to calendar and e-mails (think off all the time wasted coordinating WebEx meetings using Outlook today) by embedding online collaboration into email messages and calendar events.

One great advantage Cisco has over Google and Yahoo in this space is that they are already in the enterprise. WebEx sells directly to enterprise customers, and has been doing it for ever, and Cisco (either through channels or directly) is a strategic partner to the CIOs of many large enterprises. If they can offer a comprehensive solution, we are witnessing yet another step in the way to a more SaaSy world... It may well be a catalyst for Microsoft to offer Exchange as a service in a real way.

More on this topic in the going 100% SaaS session.