More evidence for saas momentum

by admin on March 8, 2007

David Terrar addresses a recent Gartner analysis of SaaS trends. Quoting Ben Pring

“There is now a widespread consensus among the movers and shakers of the IT industry that SaaS is an important and meaningful issue which can no longer be regarded as the ‘lunatic fringe’.”

Gartner also put out some numbers. They say

…the worldwide SaaS market reached $6.3 billion in 2006 and is forecast to grow to $19.3 billion by year-end 2011

I have no insight into the composition of that figure. I often refer to the growth of companies with known numbers of registered users like Winweb with 128K users. A year ago? About 5K. The big question of course is just how many of those registered persons is a ‘real’ user.

Over the last year, I’ve fiddled with hundreds of services but only a small handful have stood the test of time. That means about 99% of what crosses my screen never gets used with any degree of seriousness. If those vendors are experiencing the same attrition rate that I’m applying then there will be a huge amount of fallout. That’s a good reason for checking out the maturity and background of the service providers you might wish to use.

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Tagged as: SAAS

  • http://biztwozero.com David Terrar

    The SaaS equivalent of "shelfware" is quite trickey to assess, so the raw numbers might not be as clear an indicator as we'd like, but I'm convinced that there is a signficant trend towards adoption. As well as Gartner, you can look at the number of summits and conferences in the coming months where people are paying good money to go and hear about the SaaS topic. Once you've added that to internal customer survey evidence that I've seen, and the increase in enquiries all the SaaS providers are getting, there is defintely a ground swell in the SaaS direction.

  • http://www.accmanpro.com Dennis Howlett

    That's perfectly correct David but to throw a bucket of cold water on the fire for the moment – we both recall the era when vnedors were convinced that electronic marketplaces were the next big thing. You couldn't get into a CommerceOne gig at the time. Now where are they? What is different this time around is that these services span a broad swathe of ideas and business function segments.

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