The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
SaaS: The Stampede into Cloud-Based Apps continues
Gartner’s most recent report on the state of the SaaS computing market indicates that this year has seen a turning point. Up until now organizations were using SaaS for pilots or for small point solutions. But over the last three years, more than 70 percent of organizations say that they’ve been using SaaS, and they are now more comfortable with the technology. SaaS had previously been treated as an add-on to existing on-premise computing systems. But something has clicked, and that way of thinking has changed, and it’s clear that the state of the economy has had something to do with it. Now nearly one-third of all companies have on-going projects to migrate their existing on-premise solutions to the cloud.
95 percent of organizations now say that they will maintain their existing SaaS operations or have plans to grow their use of SaaS computing. Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner, said that “respondents cited ease and speed of deployment and cost-effectiveness as the top two reasons for adoption. Leading uses of SaaS were either replacements for on-premises applications or net-new SaaS solutions.”
The report identifies the following three industries as being most active in the deployment and use of SaaS: communications (52 percent), utilities (51 percent) and banking and securities (49 percent). Those industries with the most aggressive plans to increase investment in SaaS include goverment (33 percent), banking and securities (22 percent) and wholesale trade (20 percent). It’s somewhat surprising that banking and securities rank so high in both of these lists given the concerns in the finance industry about potential compliance issues with remotely-hosted data.
Three issues that organizations are reporting with SaaS though include:
- limited integration with existing systems
- network instability
- long implementation deployment cycles
Of these issues, the first two aren’t too surprising, but the last, ‘longer implementation cycles’, is a bit of a surprise. Quick deployments are supposed to be a benefit of selecting SaaS. But this problem may be directly related to the problem of the difficulty of integrating the SaaS solution. Installations not requiring customizations may be up and running within minutes or hours, while customized versions may stall out because of technical difficulties.
Along these same lines, the report notes that customers who select best-of-breed solutions will almost necessarily be giving up the advantage of out-of-the-box integrations immediately available from vendors offering SaaS product suites. Because of that, customers may find themselves making some tough choices.
The report also notes that governance issues still remain a big problem for organizations. IT is being increasingly marginalized by groups within organizations that bypass them when adopting and rolling out SaaS solutions, but this inevitably results in the lack of a central over-seeing authority that can managing the complete IT picture for these organizations. This ultimately results in inefficiencies and higher costs.
