There’s an interesting, emerging, category of startups focused on pieces of online applications. For example, if you don’t want to go to the trouble of writing the HTML for a form on your website, you can use Jot Form or FormAssembly or Wufoo or several others. They’ll serve it up for you; you just link to their service.

Likewise, there are a bunch of front ends that hide the complexity of databases for simple uses (think pipeline forecasts), including Lazybase, Starterbase, and DabbleDB. (Written in Smalltalk, of course.) You can upload your Excel spreadsheet and voila it’s available as a searchable on-line database. (Have you ever tried to take Excel data online? Ugly.) Then there are more ambitious takes, such as Zoho Creator and WyaWorks / WyaCracker, that try to bring many of these pieces together. Sort of like Ning, although I somehow think of Ning as a great idea that ever so slightly missed the mark. In any event, these pieces and parts aren’t aimed at the enterprise market, but I think there’s opportunity there to help out the poor business analyst, emailing Excel spreadsheets around.