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Hats off to Benioff and company at SalesForce.com for beating the quarterly estimates and also for keeping guidance for the year. Analysts are grappling with whether the SaaS model is immune from slowing in a down economy and the simple answer is while SaaS has the potential to reduce costs for a company and increase productivity, the challenge for SalesForce.com and other vendors is to grow as unemployment rises rapidly.

I feel unemployment will hit at least 12% and in this environment, SalesForce will have to expand by talking share from other companies to keep growing. Perhaps this is why the company added 700 new employees in the first three quarters of this year and plans on continuing this hiring spree.

Benioff remains optimistic about selling to customers of all sizes and the optimism is in stark contrast to most every other company exec. So congrats to SalesForce.com and the team for bucking the trend and the takeaway here is that SaaS is really performing well in a very difficult economic environment.

Today, TMC launches its Blog Aid program to help people out of work stay in the public eye - in order to improve their hiring prospects in a tough economy. In the last few months, many good marketers, PR people, engineers and others who have been laid off. These potential Blog Aid bloggers have a good deal of quality commentary and information to share which could be very useful to the TMC community of online readers.

TMC is offering these new bloggers - especially those working in the communications and technology industries, a venue to voice their thoughts on the spaces where they have expertise so as to allow them access to the 2-3 million global visitors who come to TMCnet on a monthly basis. In this way, these people who need assistance will not be forgotten and moreover will potentially develop a following which will lead to new freelance or permanent positions. 

• We do not want this program to be used as a venue for people to "get back" at companies who let them go.
• We also do welcome bloggers who are employed.

To become part of this program please email Greg Galitzine (ggalitzine (at) tmcnet.com).

Here are some of the news items which caught my eye recently with some commentary:

Nokia predicts the recession and a lack of credit will reduce cell phone sales. Nokia Siemens too says there will be a slowdown next year. The company further thinks the fourth quarter will see industry volumes fall by 20 million. This isn't too surprising.

Sun is laying off 6,000 workers and with the high-end server market in trouble, some are saying the future of the company is uncertain. Many techies I have spoke with are upset that the company hasn't been able to better monetize the many great products it has come up with over the years. They say this out of true admiration for Sun.

Oracle is selling an on-demand CRM solution to Olympus America - this is great news for Larry Ellison and company and shows that Oracle can not only sell software but hosted solutions as well. The challenge for Oracle is that they have such a large group of products to sell and promote, it is challenging to get the message out about all of them. Other more targeted SaaS companies are able to focus, focus, focus on SaaS.

American Airlines will now allow cell-phone based boarding passes using bar code technology. This will work on domestic flights out of select airports.

Microsoft is offering 0% financing to business customers in a move to jump-start sales. As I said yesterday, anything companies can do to help customers with financing will help boost sales. In fact, companies who have the capital to do such things are at a serious advantage over other companies who cannot.

Is service the new sales? According to Greg Gianforte, CEO and founder of RightNow, not only is this a true statement but sales is the highest form of service. In a recent podcast interview with Yours Truly, Gianforte explained how companies are focusing more heavily on service and moreover how his company is providing CRM solutions to customers which lowers costs and increases productivity.

He further explained the details of his book titled Eight to Great which focuses on how to provide an exceptional customer experience. In addition the enthusiastic CEO explains how the hosted model his company espouses coupled with proprietary technology which makes a hosted application seem like it lives on a local computer is enabling his company to take share from traditional CRM software companies.

I almost forgot to mention the bit about the bull riding - but if you want to know what I am talking about, you will have to listen for yourself.

Finally, Gianforte explains what the future will look like - in terms of updates, what his customers are looking for and most importantly what we can expect to see from RightNow in the upcoming years. It was a great podcast and I hope you enjoy it.

ScanSource plays a vital role in the distribution of products and services, shipping thousands of boxes daily from a 600,000 square foot warehouse outside of Memphis, TN where they help resellers with cash flow and even financing. In this economic environment, financing is certainly tougher to come by so this is a great offering and a tremendous value add.

Throughout my meetings in the past 24 hours it is evident that many communications infrastructure providers really value the role ScanSource plays in the market and the reseller community seems to really like what ScanSource does.

According to Baker, the future holds more acceptance of video collaboration as end users are looking to cut costs.

Another theme for the future is resellers needing to be more consultative and collaborative - asking customers "Where do you want to be in 2-5 years?" From there they need to help customers with their product roadmaps.

Regarding UC, the company sees tremendous interest but little sales so far. We discussed how networking and videoconferencing took time to catch on as well. Jokingly I mentioned that I hope UC doesn't take 18 years or so to take off like video did. Baker explained that he thinks that Microsoft's legitimization of the space is a tremendous help to the market and will certainly accelerate adoption. Resellers are aggressively getting trained on UC he tells me and there are many customer trials which will eventually turn into large deployments.

In conclusion, it is obvious the communications market will have some casualties and ScanSource CEO Mike Bauer mentioned there will be increasing consolidation among vendors and resellers going forward. Still, the IP communications market has pockets of real strength and as travel costs are cut and companies look to be more productive, ScanSource and the company's' partners and resellers are positioned well to weather the storm.

I will admit it is difficult to put the words tech and revolution together less than 24 hours after John Chambers cratered confidence in technology with a conference call which mentioned that the next quarter will likely see revenues 5-10% lower than the same quarter last year.

But as we get past this hopefully-temporary negative news, I believe we are getting ready for another technological leap where companies of all sizes begin to embrace technology like never before.

It may be useful to go backwards before we progress and in so doing let's stop in the late nineties when Al Gore mentioned the term information superhighway in a speech on TV. Almost immediately the tech markets were abuzz and I remember the next Internet World expo saw traffic increase exponentially.

You see, government has always had a huge influence over tech. In decades past, government standardization on things like UNIX which gave great confidence to IT markets that UNIX was a safe bet.

During the Bush administration however, tech seemed to have been something that didn't mesh with the understanding of the President or Vice President. After all Bush did say he pulls up maps on "The Google." Need I go on?

So if we can surmise that when government casually endorses an operating system or mentions a term in a speech and this results in a revolution in tech usage, what happens when an administration truly embraces technology?

The Obama campaign used integrated marketing better than just about any corporation I have ever seen. The had people going door to door, call on phones, they emailed, Twittered, SEOed, social networked, YouTubed, wrote iPhone apps, sent text messages and ran ads on TV. It was insane really - the Obama brand was everywhere.

Will an Obama presidency use similar levels of technology? I hope and assume so. We know government could certainly use a boost in productivity and it is about time that tech invades the White House from the top down instead of the other way around.

Another question worth asking is whether Obama will embrace technology to give citizens a larger voice in important decisions. I think there is a tremendous opportunity for him to do so. If he is smart, he will establish nationwide user names and passwords which link to driver's license or social security numbers, allowing citizens to voice their opinions on anything, everything. He can then communicate with us as needed to answer our concerns and make us feel like we are part of the process.

So assuming President Obama continues to focus on technology when he gets in the White house -- and I am optimistic he will as he has already outlined increased use of IT in healthcare and the need for broadband penetration in rural areas, we should see a trickle down of technology use in the SMB space and elsewhere.

I see this especially true in the areas of marketing where more companies will embrace social networking, texting, email, video and other forms of communications.

So once we get through this financial rough patch - and partially due to it, we will see increased of technology to enable businesses to become more productive and cost-effective. All of this bodes very well for tech over the next four years or more.