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According to the ARC Advisory Group, the supply chain management market grew 7% in the last five years. That growth would have been more if it had not been for the recession.

In comparison, the SaaS market grew at a compound annual growth rate of 20% during those same five years.

According to ARC, the overall SCM market includes "execution, production, warehouse, and transportation management -- as well as Supply Chain Planning -- strategic, manufacturing, and inventory planning."

The social enterprise space continues to gain acceptance. After years of promise, the market seems to be truly hitting its stride. This is best represented by the continued funding of social enterprise services such as Gist, which today announced it raised another $4 million.

A catalyst for this new energy has to be how it's working together with cloud computing, which is fueling apps and ecosystems that provide a fertile place for SaaS services to grow and build their subscription base. Demand is increasing for these services as many enterprises continue to find ways to drive efficiency and optimize returns. The way to do that is through cloud-based services that leverage Web-oriented architectures and offer affordable subscription-based services.

Gist represents this trend. The Seattle-based company offers a contact management system that organizes contacts across platforms such as email and social networks and lets you see that information using a dashboard environment.

Two reports issued today by Gartner and IDC show a SaaS market exhibiting double digit growth across the enterprise and in the overall market.

This a SaaS market dominated by vendors that sell services more than on-premise licenses. The growth is proof that the IT kings of the enterprise face the greatest potential disruption as traditional licensing models are replaced by subscription services.

Last week we wrote about Google's long term strategy to win over enterprise customers. But MarketWatch reported Friday on a short-term setback for Google enterprise ambitions: the company missed the deadline to deploy Google Apps to Los Angeles municipal employees. The delay revolves around security, that ever-present cloud computing concern. In response, Google announced Google Apps for Government today. Will Google be able to assuage enterprise concerns over cloud security?

As we wrote last week, the most common mistakes that SaaS providers make often involve errors made while balancing the incoming subscription receipts with the need to go out and spend some money to acquire new subscribers.

Dharmesh Shah, CTO and founder of HubSpot, recently blogged his thoughts on a similar topic: the insights he's gleaned from the B2B SaaS startup. Describing these as "non-obvious SaaS startup lessons," Shah's blog post contains a list seven important observations.

Salesforce.com announced today that Facebook, citing scalability benefits, has selected Salesforce.com's Sales Cloud 2 as its CRM solution. Facebook's been growing fast: last year it took in $700 million and expects to reach $1 billion in revenue this year. In Q1 of this year, Facebook surpassed both Yahoo! and Microsoft in total ads displayed. The company is certainly in need of a scalable sales solution.

Getting paying subscribers is by far the biggest expense for any SaaS provider. And so it means a SaaS company has to be pretty careful about the ways it spends its money.

What are the three deadly SaaS marketing mistakes? According to the blog, Practical Advice on SaaS Marketing, they are as follows:

Spending Money to Lose Money

Drew Houston of Dropbox learned the hard way what can happen when he decided to do an AdWords campaign. It cost Dropbox $233 to $388 to attract customers. But the product sold for $99. Houston had one word to describe the experience:

"Fail!"

With Microsoft and Salesforce.com locked in market and legal combat, the "open-source" (see update below) SugarCRM is quietly building its own empire. The company has landed over 6,000 customers with its focus on customization and openness. With the newly released SugarCRM 6, the company is attempting to improve its user experience while retaining the flexibility that's gotten it this far. Also, SugarCRM is also now available on Windows Azure and has integrated document collaboration via Box.net.

KickApps, a provider of enterprise-grade hosted social media platforms, announced the release of KickApps for IBM's WebSphere Commerce today. Websphere Commerce users will have the ability to integrate KickApps social media features into their stores and create highly targeted offers based on customer behaviors. The new "eSpots" feature of the product will allow users to create their own widgets to place on other web sites.

Mzinga has announced the latest version of its SaaS enterprise social software suite OmniSocial, with improved control panel, expanded analytics, mobile apps and more. The new features were made available to customers yesterday.

Mzinga has amassed an impressive client list, including ABC, Ford, Chevron, Amazon.com and AOL. It says it has over 300 clients with a total of over 40 million users.