SaaS hits the hockey stick
New research by industry analyst Saugatuck Technology shows "a dramatic increase in the percentage of executives who plan on using SaaS for business-critical operations." Compared to a year ago, the numbers who plan to say 'yes' to SaaS have more than doubled, from one third or less of respondents a year ago to a half to two-thirds this year.
The research alert, entitled One Year Later: SaaS Breaks Out, reports that respondents were asked about four separate use cases:
- Applications that support a widely distributed marketplace
- Applications that are back-end database-driven
- Supplementing software deployed behind the firewall
- Mission-critical business applications
Most surprising of all was a huge jump from 18% last year to 49% this year of companies planning to use SaaS for mission-critical applications. Even more striking was the surge in acceptance of SaaS for this type of application among large enterprises (revenues of more than $1 billion), where the proportion saying they'd adopt SaaS actually quadrupled from one-in-eight to more than half. "The large-enterprise executives in our survey indicate that they do not plan for SaaS to replace on-premises software," notes the analyst. "Rather, it will predominantly supplement software deployed behind the firewall."
The full survey, the second in an annual series, is due for release in April. This year's study was based on an expanded pool of respondents compared to last year, and included more than a hundred large enterprises.