The dream made possible by Web 2.0 and SaaS - of small companies providing large numbers of customers a price-killing product - just does not translate well to the Enterprise Application marketplace, Callender explains.

"Until now," he says. "Tooltwist is a development environment specifically designed for creating Web 2.0 applications that will be customized. It provides a layered application model, where a customer has the ability to insert new layers that override standard application layers, without modifying the base application."

"Any part of the application -- the screens, the data model, the menus, user privileges, language translations, browser based logic, server based logic, etc -- can all be modified using the Tooltwist workbench," Callender continues. "These variations from the basic application are then packaged into a PARC (plug-in archive), which can loaded directly into a running server. These modifications can be made without having the source code to the original application."

In an SaaS environment, this means that customers and 3rd party developers can create customizations and load them quickly and easily into the SaaS based application, without the SaaS vendor being involved. The result is that the SaaS vendor doesn't need to set up customer-specific servers, doesn't need to alter their base product, and doesn't need to support dozens or hundreds of versions of their application.

"This technology is amazing," says Aravind Naidu of Phinza Inc (www.phinza.com), a company that sells a comprehensive ITIL based IT Operations Management (ITOM) system that was developed using Tooltwist.

"We were able to develop one of the world's largest AJAX applications with a small development team," he continues, adding:

"Our customers have the ability to make extensive customizations to virtually any aspect of our application. They can load their PARCs directly into our servers -- we don't even need to know they're doing it." Mr Naidu stated that he sees that this capability provides a fundamental advantage over his competition. "We're keeping our head count down, we're getting great economies of scale on our servers, and our customers can make all the modifications they want. They're also getting a price they love."