This past week’s SaaScon gathering in Santa Clara, CA, gave the rapidly growing SaaS industry another opportunity to take stock of its current state and where it is headed.

I was very pleased to serve as the event’s Master of Ceremonies and a member of the Advisory Board—along with Amy Wohl and Phil Wainwright—that helped to shape the conference agenda and recruit the speakers.

The event drew well over twice the number of attendees and sponsors of our inaugural conference last September. And, this was despite facing competition from the SIIA’s Software Strategy Summit and the Web 2.0 conference taking place in San Francisco.

SaaScon gave a wide array of companies—large and small, new and ‘old’—an opportunity to present and learn about the opportunities and challenges surrounding ‘on-demand’ services. The mix of formal sessions and informal networking gave everyone plenty to digest. It also provided a convenient place for many attendees to explore partnering opportunities with one another.

While the event drew fewer customers than we would have preferred, there wasn’t a lack of interesting content, noteworthy speakers and important announcements.

On the news front, Symantec used the event to launch its new Symantec Protection Network of on-demand SaaS solutions starting with a data storage, back-up and recovery service.

Among the noteworthy speakers were Dave Duffield, the founder of PeopleSoft and now Workday; SaaS pioneer, Greg Gianforte, founder/CEO of RightNow; and Jeffrey Nick, EMC’s CTO tasked with driving the vendor’s foray into SaaS.

Duffield and Workday’s co-founder, Aneel Bhusri, outlined how Workday is quickly rolling out a portfolio of on-demand services and capturing an impressive assortment of customers and partners, including Accenture. While still small, Workday could become a major force in the software industry, challenging NetSuite in the SaaS sector and established players like Oracle and SAP.

(Oracle made a weak attempt to steal some attention away from SaaScon with an announcement that coincided with the opening day of the event about enhancements to its own on-demand services.)

Greg Gianforte demonstrated once again why he has been one of the most effective evangelists for the SaaS movement using his own company’s growth as a measure of the growing acceptance of SaaS in both the commercial and public sectors.

Although EMC hasn’t unveiled its SaaS strategy or portfolio yet, Jeffrey Nick impressed his SaaScon audience with his theories about how SaaS will enable companies to better achieve their information lifecycle management (ILM) goals.

Paul Johnston, President/CEO of Entellium, also dazzled the attendees with his views about how SaaS vendors should apply the features of today’s successful online games to their business applications.

In sum, it was an informative and productive two days in Santa Clara. Contact me if you couldn’t attend and would like additional insight about what you missed.

And, stay tuned for details about the next SaaScon and other SaaS events that are on my calendar.