Discussion on:

An emerging cloud trend: Solution-as-a-service?

I'll admit there are a few business processes which are straightforward - document editing and managaement for instance. But for most business processes they are usually supported by a slew of custom applications combined with many various software tools. The implementation of those tools and business logic can be extremely complex at times. Simple rules such as document naming standards and which department to hand it off to next can be difficult to implement in a off the shelf package. And if you begin adding lots of configuration options, it almost becomes a programming task anyway, and a dive into the software maintenance lifecycle. Maybe the focus for a cloud solution would be hand-off of data between software applictions. You almost need a master work tracking application that has hooks into all of the other applications, and can send the work to the next person or department automatically.