Everyone has heard of speed dating - but the new new thing is using it for business. I experienced it in Sydney but it seems to be a global phenomenon…. and a great idea.

Last week was a good example - a crowd of SaaS trendies gathered to hear about a bunch of business solutions at the upmarket Establishment Hotel chaired by our good friends and premier partner - sqwarepeg and was billed as ‘like speed dating for business solutions’.

So how does it work? The format is simple.

Prospective clients register online and get to spend a few minutes with each vendor. Just like real speed dating the convener rings a bell at the end of the allotted time (3 minutes for singles meeting at traditional speed dating or in this case 10 minutes for prospects meeting vendors) and everyone moves on to the next ‘date’. In this case the date was held at a ‘pod’ complete with plasma and internet connectivity with demo SaaS application up and running.

If you are interested in continuing the ‘relationship’ you exchange cards or in true speed dating style write your details on the sheets provided.

Now repeat for each vendor until every prospect has seen every product once.

The great thing about this format is for clients they see a broad section of offerings quickly without risking getting stuck with a boring geek (just like speed dating). For vendors they get to meet a variety of clients and tailor the pitch just a little to stress the client specific needs just enough to follow up later.

Vendors showing at this session were Saasu.com showing our web finance engine (of course), Google showed Adwords, Omniture.com showed their rather cool web analytics (for higher end clients who outgrown Google Analytics), Eloqua, salesforce.com and Sqwarepeg also showed their own products.

The amount of cross-over between vendors was interesting, a good number were using each other’s products.

This event was called the ‘On Demand Circuit’ which is a face to face version of our own nascent online SaaSbay.com - both of which are trying to build the local SaaS ecosystem.

Next time we aim to show the applications interacting and really demonstrate the power of the SaaS ecosystem in action. This will be great e.g. Saasu already talks to salesforce.com and so do other products.