Diligent Board Member Services, which provides software for company directors, continued its exponential sales growth with new record in the March quarter as its shares rose to a record price.

The Ministry of Economic Development has invited proposals for the supply of an electronic marketplace (or “e-marketplace”) solution under that would work under a “software-as-a-service” (“SaaS”) delivery model.

SaaS - a close relative to cloud computing - involves software and a service that sits on the internet and is accessible from any PC.

New Zealand software as a service (SaaS) provider ActionStep has extended its market share into the UK by signing a deal with Deskforce.

Microsoft has announced pricing and details for its Software-As-A-Service (Saas, or ‘cloud computing’) offering Azure, marking a significant change in direction for the formerly desktop software focused company.

There plans include a pay-as-you-go consumption-based pricing model, and one that offers discounted rates for those that agree to a six-month commitment, reports CNet.

One of the drawbacks of cloud computing was dramatically illustrated today as Rackspace - one of the world's largest web hosts - when offline for 45 minutes. New Zealand’s Xero was one of many SaaS (software-as-a-service) providers knocked out by the failure, with glitches continuing for hours.

The accounting software provider went offline around 8.30am as Rackspace, which hosts all of Xero's data, was hit by a still-unexplained, catastrophic failure.

All Xero servers were back up and running by 9.10am chief operations officer Alistair Grigg told NBR.