To a lunch meeting today with John Appleby and Colm Mulcahy, respectively chairman and CEO of Saaspoint, a company formed in 2005 to facilitate on-demand CRM implementations built on Salesforce.com.

When I first met Appleby and Mulcahy, barely one year ago at the Salesforce.com ‘Dreamforce’ event in San Francisco, the company seemed to have found its specialist niche partnering with the software as a service (SaaS) tyro as an expert go-between betwixt the vendor and its then mainly medium-sized client base.

In other words, Saaspoint was playing in that large, traditionally barren space where CIOs fear to tread, and large consultancies cannot afford to go.

Today, however, found Saaspoint a different, evolved, and more interesting proposition: the company has moved away from its sole focus on Salesforce.com and into the area of business transformation, wider SaaS consultancy, and partnership with Google.

As I discussed in a recent blog, the ‘Fortune Five Million’ of smaller enterprises that underpin the economy are almost impossible for large consultancies and services companies to sell into profitably without undermining their business models.

That leaves the playing field open for once-niche SaaS packagers, as it were, to move up the value chain and take increasing numbers of smaller enterprises with them.

Saaspoint and others have seen that opportunity and moved swiftly to grasp it, which shows how fast the SaaS market is maturing.

Indeed, Saaspoint is even debating the merits of outsourcing some aspects of its services as it nearly doubles its employee base – and in a year that has witnessed a severe downturn for most of us.

That said, there is some realpolitik at play here: Salesforce.com offerings and services are becoming increasingly commoditised, forcing its intermediary partners up the value chain – and elsewhere – to survive.

Also, they said, the past six months have seen contract signings forced to jump through a few extra hoops to keep client CFOs happy.

On the other hand, Appleby and Mulcahy claimed that most CIOs are now fully on board with SaaS (perhaps, but how many CIOs are there?), while less than one year ago the duo seemed gloomy at the prospect of CIOs’ negative interventions in SaaS implementations.

I took the opportunity to corner Appleby and Mulcahy about my current pet peeve: the baffling and inappropriate use of the term ‘cloud computing’ to describe the simple concept of on-demand software and services delivered over the Internet. How could this hope to win over the smaller, less expert business?

It won’t, they confirmed: terms like ‘cloud computing’ are invented solely to give large enterprises something to get excited about, and large consultancies something to demystify for a vast fee.

Shhh, don’t tell anyone….