The allure of flexible usage policies, less intense deployments and predictable costs is driving scores of enterprises to consider applications delivered over the Web.

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model is probably most often associated with the CRM world, thanks to vendors like Salesforce.com, NetSuite and RightNow Technologies. But it’s gaining traction in plenty of other markets as well, including finance and accounting, human resources, supply chain, document management and regulatory compliance.

According to analysts, adoption will continue to grow. Gartner, for example, predicts 25% of new business software will be delivered in the SaaS model by 2011, an increase from 5% in 2005.

As the market grows, application providers are looking for ways to make their Web-based offerings even more attractive to enterprise buyers and reduce any lingering IT concerns about service and performance. Optimizing delivery of the software is a natural tactic to consider, and one vendor ready to assist is Akamai Technologies.

Less than three months after its Netli acquisition, Akamai is touting increased interest in its application acceleration services among companies that offer SaaS. Between January 2006 and January 2007, Akamai has had more than a five-fold increase in the amount of application traffic delivered on behalf of SaaS providers.

Akamai's Web Application Accelerator service leverages Akamai's global network of servers and content-delivery platform, which use the vendor’s SureRoute algorithms to avoid Internet trouble-spots.

“Akamai benefits clients by being able to determine the best route from end user to origin for route optimization, then optimizing at the protocol layer (which cuts the number of trips along that best path),” writes Counse Broders, a research director at Current Analysis, in a new research brief. “With its application layer optimization, it can tap into pre-fetching, compression, and caching, which can assist in offloading bandwidth out of a data center.”

Customers say it’s making a difference.

“Once we implemented Akamai's Web Application Accelerator service, we were able to increase the speed of transactions for our application by up to 500%, while maintaining consistency of performance in every single one of our markets,” says Paul Cochrane, a systems architect at Autodesk, which offers collaborative design and project management products for the building and construction industry.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.