Check out Etelos. These guys provide a very open, flexible and powerful platform for provisioning and developing hosted applications (particularly customer relationship management apps, but extending to all kinds of other apps as well -- for example, you could use their stuff as a publishing system as well). Much of their stack is open source, and they are working to provide access to their framework from any
language and platform.
Most importantly (and this is the big thing that sets them apart from hosted-only systems such as Salesforce.com), they just provide software licensing and support. They don't force you to host your code and data on their servers (in fact, they don't even provide hosting anymore -- if you need hosting, you can get it through one of their hosting partners). This gets their customers past the biggest objections of hosted applications -- "Can I get access to the data?" "If I use your hosted system, does that mean I'm locked in forever?" and "Is my confidential data secure (even from your own system administrators)?" If you're hosting the code and the data on your own servers, or at least one that isn't managed by the platform provider with the goal of locking you in and restricting what you can do, the answers to these questions become much easier.
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