The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
SaaS: On a Convergence Path with the Cloud
SaaS and Cloud Computing have been growing rapidly. New research from Gartner estimates that the SaaS market grew at 15.7 percent in 2010 to $9.2 billion, with slightly stronger growth of 16.2 percent expected in 2011, raising global SaaS revenues to $10.7 billion.
SaaS applications are hosted by vendors on vendor hardware and provided to clients as a service, typically by subscription. The advantage of SaaS to businesses is that the responsibility of installing, hosting and managing software on a daily basis is shifted to the vendor. Organizations are increasingly finding the SaaS model more attractive compared to the traditional model of managing software on-premise. Gartner estimates that 75 percent of all SaaS hosting today is done via the cloud and that by 2014 the number will be closer to 90 percent.
Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner explained that “initial concerns about security, response time and service availability have diminished for many organizations as SaaS business and computing models have matured and adoption has become more widespread. Usage and vendors’ on-demand ecosystems continue to evolve to provide additional business and technology services, more-vertical-specific functionality, and stronger communities of partners and buyers.”
Somewhat surprisingly, Gartner found that the SaaS application revenue leader not to be CRM, but a category that Gartner is calling content, communication and collaboration (CCC). Global CCC revenues in 2010 were $2.9 billion and CRM applications came in as a close second at $2.6 billion. But while SaaS sales of CCC are high, applications like Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and search still only make up only a very small part of that total.
