SaaS in federal govt

I recently attended a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) conference hosted by Computerworld, in Santa Clara, CA. While I started out being skeptical as to how this might apply to the federal govt (there were a lot of representation by small to medium sized businesses) I left with the impression that SaaS, while still young, will grow considerably in the near future. Government has been a bit reserved in the adoption of SaaS. Security continues to be the major concern for government agencies. Ultimately, education regarding SaaS and multitenancy seems to be what is most needed to achieve a broader adoption. Items such as government employee attrition and constrained budgets are additional catalysts for future adoption. Many government IT leaders see SaaS as the conduit for true government-to-government collaboration with reduced operating costs and increased efficiencies due to reusability and intellectual property sharing between federal, state, and local agencies. In talking with folks from GAO and other agencies, this impression was confirmed. The govt is not really interested in owning software if it doesn't have to. For folks who are not familiar with SaaS, here are some overly simplistic definitions. ASP: Traditional COTS apps in a hosted environment. SOA: Any application that when broken down equates to services. SaaS: Essentially, SOA for hire; net centric software offered in a multitenant fashion.