I don't remember the exact date, but I'd guess it was around Summer of 2005 when we faced the "Enterprise Software Fork In the Road".
 
After years of serving mostly mid-market customers with on-premise customer experience solutions (portals, web sites, eMarketing campaigns), attention abruptly shifted towards open source and on-demand solutions as alternatives.
 
Customers with in-house development resources started asking for source code to customize their CEM apps, others asked if we would host the sites for them and provide ongoing maintenance, partners needed more documentation to develop rich add-on applications, large customers demanded the source code be held in escrow in case we went "Tango-Uniform" and sales cycles got longer... a lot longer.
 
One of my favorite quotes from Yogi Berra is "When you get to fork in the road, take it." (Berra says this is part of driving directions to his house in Montclair, New Jersey. There is a fork in the road, and whichever way you take, you will get to his house). And so, we took both paths and launched an on-demand CEM solution with an open source CMS framework that provides customers and partners with unrestricted access to the source code, to offer an Open Software-as-a-Service, or "Open SaaS" model.

 
The feedback we've received from open sourcing the Salesforce integration module has been tremendous. Some customers have started down the open source path with the intent of building and hosting the solution in-house, only to discover the long term benefits if they outsource the hosting and occasionally exercise their right to upload their customizations and code anytime (in the worse case they know they can always take the solution back in house).
 
Conversely, some customers have started down the on-demand path, recognized how strategic the online customer experience is to their business, and upgraded their SLA to have us co-manage a server provisioned and owned by them.
 
Change management and version control are inevitable problems that will arise when both customer and hosting provider are collaborating on the management of an Open SaaS web site/portal. We've had a few content collisions and merge conflicts, but had sufficient backup and recovery processes in place to remedy them immediately. i-Dialogue 3.0 addresses many problems related to temporal content, such as press releases and events. Typically, just a bit of training on the web page "sandbox" feature and use of Snippet versions are sufficient to resolve these issues.
 
It's also imperative to maintain a common code base across all hosted applications to reduce the risk of "branching". Most content management systems (CMS) today have evolved to a level of maturity that easily supports this requirement through the use of page templates and declarative configuration.
 
Does Open SaaS work with all applications? Absolutely not. It just happens to work in customer experience management because it requires pixel level control over the form of the interactions (aka the "brand" experience). But employee facing productivity SaaS applications are best managed at arms length with declarative customization to achieve their desired function. New languages, such as Salesforce.com's Apex scripting language, will give customers greater freedom to upload their own business logic code.