While Salesforce.com gets the lion's share of the media attention and credit for pioneering the software as a service (SaaS) model, it is by no means the only company who stands to profit from the model, Kagan said.

"This validates idea of platform like AppExchange that others will emulate, but the real model for this is a company like IBM and its partner network. It's not as prominent a platform, but it's just as powerful a mechanism for them to test the working relationship between third parties and (IBM)," he said.