Industry news

Growing number of firms adopting SaaS

An increasing number of small and medium enterprises are adopting software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions in a bid to deploy more easily manageable IT.

According to research from AMI-Partners, 21 per cent of small firms and 31 per cent of medium sized organisations have already deployed some manner of SaaS solution, which is double the amount that had done so in 2004.

The study revealed that SaaS growth is partly due to the limited infrastructure and IT resources at the disposal of SMBs, while savings brought about by such a delivery model also serve to attract new firms to the market.

"More work is required to propel SaaS to the next level of growth. SaaS vendors need to intensify campaigns to educate and spark interest among SMBs that are not yet considering SaaS, identify other needs that existing customers have and develop and partner to extend their offerings to increase share of wallet," said Sau Lam, business applications & solutions analyst at AMI-Partners.

She also explained that growth of SaaS was due to the increasing number and variety of offerings from both established vendors, such as Microsoft, SAP, IBM and Google, and newer vendors such as NetBooks, Longjump and Coghead.