The trend for businesses to rent, rather than buy their software greatly reduces implementation risk and saves money. The rise of software as a service ("SaaS") is inevitable -- but it's also reshaping the investment character of the software, services, and hardware sectors. Fool contributor John Finneran offers guidance on what SaaS means for investors.

Understanding SLAs is critical for customers thinking of doing business with an on-demand provider. Currently, there are no industry standards for SLAs and on-demand vendors are free to guarantee as much or as little of their offering as they desire. Still others, such as Salesforce.com, don't even offer their customers standard SLA agreements, "leaving it up to the buyer to fight for one," says Liz Herbert, an analyst at Forrester Research.

"Our acquisition of Salesnet brings substantial sales workflow domain expertise to our business, accelerates our roadmap by more than a year and adds hundreds of customers to our client base," Greg Gianforte, founder and chief executive officer at RightNow, said. "RightNow will continue to build out its capabilities to offer organizations solutions and expertise to create a competitively differentiated customer experience throughout every customer interaction channel."