But the industry executives have cited subtle differences at the Software & Information Industry Association (SIAA) OnDemand 2009 conference held in San Jose, Calif., in a panel session pertaining to the cloud computing, business models, and also the enterprise.

The panelists spoke about the cloud and SaaS as being separate entities. Treb Ryan who is the CEO of cloud infrastructure provider OpSource, has stressed that the service levels of what we see in the cloud till now are far worse than the ones seen from any of the SaaS provider.

When asked about the differences between SaaS and the cloud computing, Ryan and also IBM's Dave Mitchell who is the director of strategy & emerging business for the ISV and the developer relations have cited the nuanced differences. Mitchell has said that some people view SaaS as being a layer within the cloud computing. He also added that SaaS is actually about delivering the application on the subscription model on the Internet and when we talk about the cloud computing, it needs to have some significant real attributes around elasticity and scalability and also he said that not all of the SaaS solutions have this kind of elasticity which is associated with the cloud computing.