It has been an interesting couple of months with recent research released by leading analysts - all putting their stakes in the ground for current and future growth in the software as a service segment globally.
Saasu received a kind mention in the latest Springboard Research press release.
It must be interesting because it was also picked up by a bunch of other media channels including -
The research claims 92.5% growth was experienced in 2006 to reach a market size of US$154 million and forecasts 83% growth in 2008 and growing to US$1.16 Billion in 2010 just for Asia.
Probably more interesting is the increase in awareness and adoption. These were up from 41% in 2006 to 75% in 2007 for awareness and actual adoption of some kind of SaaS service now use at 46% for the nearly four hundred firms surveyed.
This compares to IDC’s view of the on-demand world market (courtesy of NZTE) with 29.5% pa average growth 2007-20011 with estimated market size of US$3.95 Billion in 2006 (up 54% on 2005) and hitting US$14.5 Billion in 2011.
I have watched Springboard for some years and consider them to be one of the better experts in the area but who knows. One thing is certain - the future looks bright for SaaS and Saasu.com in particular.
Overall growth stats I hear bounced around in the industry are typically a minimum of 25%pa for the foreseeable future and 20-30% of the enterprise software market being addressable by SaaS. Personally I think both of these are on the low side.
I don’t envy the research people from IDC and Springboard who have to work this out.
One thing the industry and observers do tend to agree on is the reasons why people use SaaS - ease of use, ease of implementation and cost savings.
Personally I think these are ‘early stage’ responses and once people start really using the products they will add two more reasons - a) additional internet enabled features (e.g. simple emailing of things automatically like payslips, business intelligence and more) and b) richer other features that they actually use (as opposed to bloatware that has loads of un-used features - good SaaS vendors will watch their clients and learn - that is the key differentiator that will decide the eventual winners).
