Haile had been CIO at Fidelity Investments.

Peter Solvik, managing director at Sigma Partners and a former Cisco CIO, was not as sold on the concept of SaaS. "I think it's going to be a while [before] a large enterprise is going to take things like core desktop applications and email and have it be entirely hosted" on a consumer platform, he said.

Mark Iwanowski, a former Oracle CIO and current venture partner at Trident Capital, said the question on SaaS in the enterprise was a matter of "how fast it's going to happen."

The encroachment of consumer technologies into the enterprise space has been a theme of the conference. "People's expectations of how simple and fast and easy something ought to be is set on the consumer side and they bring those expectations to work with them," said Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of the Enterprise group at Google, in an interview.

Also at the conference, Thomas Hale, senior vice president of the Knowledge Worker Business Unit at Adobe Systems, said there is a need for technology to be developed that melds collaboration capabilities and content in a single UI. But a conference attendee responded that collaborating is difficult already because of time issues.