There are a number of companies that have taken a big chunk of market share from incumbent legacy giants. These are the super SaaS providers. The ones like Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Workday that have succeeded in building significant businesses by focusing on the weak spots of the slow moving titans.

I run across a few that have the potential to become “Super SaaS” companies.  They are the ones with just the right technology mix, savvy business sense and great timing.

Axcient is one of the few this year that I have run across that I think can leap to the super SaaS category.

How do you measure these companies success?

Data is one mechanism.  It’s through that filter that I’d expect Axcient to reach the same plateau as the very successful new generation of SaaS providers.  According to CEO Justin Moore, the company will add petabytes of data this year alone and are uploading as much as 15,000 gigabytes per day.

Axcient offers a  platform for backup, business continuity, and disaster recovery. Moore says it’s like Apple’s Time Machine but for the enterprise.  Salesforce.com attacked Siebel. For its part, Axcient is targeting Symantec and its Backupe Exec software.

Today the company announced a new service that provides instant backup. That means if your network goes down then you can get it right back. It’s all in the cloud. Axcient gives the assurance that your infrastructure will never go down.

Moore  says Axcient has 2,500 customers. They recently hired 30 people. By the end of the year the staff will reach 150 to 200 people.

And it looks like it may be gearing up for an IPO. It may be a while but the company recently hired CFO John Finegan, who has experience in the IPO world.

Can Axcient be a super SaaS? It has a deep partnership with HP. Axcient devices get installed on HP servers so businesses can do their backups. It is now talking with other systems companies to leverage their channels as well.  The devices run on any x86 architecture but the company wants to establish a strong channel to cover the largest part of the market.

If Axcient can partner with the likes of Dell then I expect it can reach that super SaaS status. Until then,  its reach into the cloud can only extend so far.