Apps: While SaaS has thus far progressed by appealing to small companies and moving up from there, one area has seen some traction among large customers. That would be EDI between supplier and buyers. “Strangely enough, although suppliers are those most in need of a solution like this, it is the customers — Target, Welch’s, and so on — that are actually buying into the solution. After all, when a supplier doesn’t get it right, the retailer suffers, too,” Ephraim Schwartz explains in SaaS means business-to-business. “The more I cover SaaS as a reporter, the more respect I gain for the model, and the more I believe that in just a few more years it will become the entrenched incumbent waiting for some new upstart methodology to unseat it.”Test Center review: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 is a contender for the best Windows-hosted C/C++ IDE, Martin Heller espouses. “I ran the VS08 Team Suite on my XP desktop almost all day, five days a week for several weeks, and tried to use it for all my development work,” he explains. “Overall, Visual Studio 2008 is an upgrade that most Microsoft-oriented development shops will want to make, in order to develop with new technologies, such as WPF, WCF, and WF, and for new platforms, such as Windows Vista. However, it’s not an upgrade that’s easily made piecemeal.” Read the full review. The news beat: Intel is likely to reveal details of its forthcoming Silverthorne processor next week at the International Solid State Circuits Conference. Spring Framework for Java provider SpringSource buys Covalent to get its services for Apache users, including Tomcat, Geronimo and the Axis Web Framework. Microsoft partner Intermedia becomes the first to offer Office Communications Server as a hosted service. And President Bush calls on Congress to extend telecom spying provisions, during his final State of the Union address, saying “to protect America, we need to know who the terrorists are talking to, what they are saying.” Software Development