David Berlind on the ‘Between the Lines’ blog at ZDNet tells of the unique pleasure of sitting next to SuccessFactors’ own Marty Pitkow (pictured) on an airplane the other day. And believe it or not, Marty helped him experience a SaaS epiphany.

How, you might ask? Well as it turns out, David was on the way back from the Gartner Symposium where one analyst recommended (link to another ZdNet article) that it was time for companies to “not own, but rent” applications – among some other visionary proclamations. And so David had SaaS on the brain – but talking to Marty drove the point home.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I agree with David’s conclusion – that SaaS is ultimately a no brainer. Here’s an excerpt:

Think about it.  How many businesses need the headaches of:

• downloading, installing, configuring and making operational a mission critical application
• updating that application every time some important patch or update becomes available
• figuring out how to Webify that application so that it can be used from just about anywhere
• backing up the data on a regular basis
• worrying about availability, redundancy, and other issues related to fault-tolerance
• providing end-user support

More IT people.  More hardware (or hosting).  More costs.  More headaches.  And these are benefits that can accrue to businesses of any size.

Enough said. It’s worth a read, if only because he figured out a way to draw an analogy between SaaS and Tang. That’s right, Tang.