Information gained from Gary McAuliffe ,VP of business development and general manager at Hosted Solutions, points towards as the software industry is changing at a scorching pace, competition and customer demand are quickly rising, forcing software firms to provide optimum solutions to remain at the forefront.

Competition and customer demand appear to be the most important external issues facing software vendors entering the market. Nonetheless, Hosted Solutions says that partnering with managed service providers is a excellent opportunity for software vendors that want to develop the contact of their product since not only can hosts take their solution global immediately, while still producing the best possible user experience, but can offer reliable uptime and dutiful customer service. Hosted Solutions says Web hosts can also reduce a SaaS application’s time to market, giving the software vendor a competitive benefit.

Last month, Hosted Solutions added its second enterprise data center in the Charlotte, North Carolina market to support the company’s sustained development.

The managed hosting sector is still the largest sector in Internet infrastructure experiencing over 30 percent growth in the last 12 months and estimated to grow another 24 percent in 2008 according to the report titled “Internet Infrastructure: Market Overview 2008″.

Tier 1 says multiple factors are responsible for the increased growth including increased managed hosting take-up by small to medium-sized businesses and mid-tier enterprises, as well as hosting for software as a service provision.

Progressing into 2009 and 2010, a range of innovative utility storage and hosting services will maintain continued growth, says the research firm.

Daniel Golding, senior analyst at T1R and author of the report stated “While the managed hosting sector sees tremendous growth, a massive transformation in how shared hosting services are successfully marketed and sold is well under way. Disk space and bandwidth is no longer a selling point and customers are now looking for the functionality that enables them to do things like blog, share photos, publish profile pages on a social network or sell things online. As a result, shared hosting has quickly commoditized and become a common denominator of sorts. In other words, shared hosting is no longer just about selling Web space for static websites. Rather, it is more about the many different things that can be done in a hosted environment.”

A report released in the first half of 2007 highlighting mergers and acquisitions activity in the Internet infrastructure and mass-market was released by Tier1