SaaS Gold Diggers

Every peroid has its "El Dorado Gold Rush". Its a period when everybody is "irrationally optimistic" about his chances of finding gold and arriving home as a winner. The current gold rush in IT business seems to be a concept called Software as a Service or SaaS. If you dont understand what it is, its a service where all your business applications are delivered like Gmail delivers your email to you. And I did not mean free. Imagine this. You dont have install any software or hardware or networking. Identify the software (over web) that is good for you and buy (using credit card) an internet connection. Done. 

Now the gold part - since its a web based service, all you need to do is to get a team together and write your own version of the software that a customer has been using for donkeys years. Be it a simple accouting software or a diary keeping software. You can create a business plan to achieve as much as you want. The calculation looks like this, there are X million users of this software @ Y $ per annum. I am providing the same service at 80% discount (since I dont have a massive marketing and sales engine) I can get atleast 1% of the market. Even this market will turn out to be in millions of users. And voila, you have numbers touching many millions. GOLD RUSH, incase you forgot. 

The people who actually found gold were the people who were selling tools for digging, or hotels for diggers or even "professions soliciting services for relaxation". If that is true (assumption), then who are the probable gold finders in this scenario:

- Infrastructure providers:

- Data centres:

- Software: Billing and reconciliation

- Payment services: credit card services providers

- advertisers: I think Google 

Leaving the thought open to explore who are these in today's world.