Not too long ago, we posted our 2009 Cloud Computing Eco-System Map, featuring startups and giants in everything from infrastructure to virtualization to SaaS applications at the tip of the stack.

Last week, thanks to Joe Weinman, Strategy and Emerging Services Vice President at AT&T (and a judge at this week’s Under the Radar conference), we met Jeff Kaplan of THINKstrategies.

Jeff has created what I believe to be the most comprehensive directory of SaaS providers I’ve come across.

You can search by application category (business intelligence, collaboration, salesforce automation, eLearning, web analytics, etc), industry sector (education, non-profit, retail, healthcare…) as well as for providers of enabling technologies and services for SaaS providers.

According to Jeff, SaaS Showplace aims to provide the following benefits:

- Give enterprise decision-makers a quick directory of the leading SaaS providers and a convenient source of valuable insight regarding SaaS trends.

- Give SaaS providers a targeted tool to increase their visibility among enterprise decision-makers, and gain access to key enabling technology suppliers.

- Give enabling technology suppliers a specialized platform to increase industry awareness regarding their SaaS solutions.

If you’re on the hunt for SaaS solutions – or even doing competitive research for your own needs, check it out.

In addition, SaaS Showplace also has a Best Practices Portal containing whitepapers, webcasts, company success stories and discussion groups — helping people like me (and you) keep our fingers on the pulse of the rapidly growing sector. Now that’s SaaSy! (I couldn’t resist… I know)