The global Software-as-a-Service market is predicted to see 20.7% growth in 2011 to generate $12.1 billion, up from a 2010 total of $10 billion, according to Gartner.
CRM continues to be the largest single SaaS market and is continuing to mature as the availability and usage of such offerings became more pervasive, said the researcher’s research vice president, Tom Eid:
He added:
The second largest SaaS segment, meanwhile, is the content, communications and collaboration sector, which is expected to grow 17.9% in 2011 to surpass $3.3 billion. Offerings within this umbrella grouping show the widest disparity in adoption terms, with SaaS representing just 5% of total enterprise content management sales and about 83% of the entire web conferencing space.
Where uptake is still the most meagre overall, however, is in the ERP world. Although the SaaS chunk is expected to grow 13.3% over the year ahead to hit $1.7 billion, the figure still represents a tiny 7% of the overall market. SaaS penetration also varies widely between functional areas, with human capital management having adopted it the most and manufacturing and enterprise asset management the least.
Eid believes that 75% of SaaS offerings as measured by revenue could now be considered true cloud offerings, with the figure expected to exceed 90% in four years time "as the SaaS model matures and converges with Cloud service models". This is set to exceed 90 per cent by 2015 as SaaS matures, creating global revenues of $21.3 billion.
