While Salesforce.com and its Founder/CEO/Chairman, Mark Benioff, get most of the attention and credit for setting the standard for the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) movement, OpSource and its Founder/CEO, Treb Ryan, have done more than their share to evangelize the business benefits of SaaS and educate the software industry about the steps to success in this market.

Treb saw the opportunity to differentiate OpSource from the floundering hosting business by focusing on a nascent SaaS marketplace early. The company asserted itself as the “SaaS Experts” by establishing a professional services arm which helped aspiring on-demand companies understand the business of SaaS. It also initiated an aggressive marketing campaign in 2005-2006 which included an incubation program, countless webinars and the SaaS industry’s first conference, the SaaS Summit.

The company used the occasion of its second annual SaaS Summit in Monterey, CA, this week to unveil its new portfolio of SaaS enablement capabilities. Borrowing a page from Salesforce.com’s AppExchange platform strategy, OpSource 2.0 includes a similar platform approach with a set of SaaS tools and services which harness the technology and skills of its ecosystem of partners.

OpSource 2.0 is built on an Optimal Services Bus (OSB), a service-oriented architecture that permits on-demand applications which run on OpSource’s Optimal On-Demand platform to leverage additional OpSource and third-party components.

The first of these components is Optimal Insight, based on Visual Mining graphical dashboarding capabilities, which will give SaaS companies an integrated, real-time view into the business and operational performance of their on-demand applications.

In April 2007, OpSource will introduce Optimal Billing, an end-to-end billing, payment and collections processing capability, built on Aria Systems’ billing and payments system.

Later this year, OpSource will roll out Optimal Research, which will give SaaS vendors the ability to conduct user surveys, and test marketing and sales promotions.

OpSource’s goal is to provide SaaS vendors a complete, Web-based development environment to build and deliver successful on-demand applications.

The company may not be able to match the physical resources and financial assets of the larger players in the market, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming a pivotal player and important catalyst in the SaaS industry.

A measure of OpSource’s importance in the SaaS industry has been the size of its Summit gatherings, and the stature of the speakers and attendees at these events.

If Salesforce.com and Mark Benioff are setting the standard for boldness in the SaaS industry, OpSource and Treb Ryan aren’t far behind.