Gartner survey: SaaS use to explode in 2010

A new Gartner survey of 270 IT and business management professionals from a variety of industries in North America, Europe and Asia/Pacific shows a healthy 95 percent of organizations plan to maintain or grow their SaaS use through 2010.

“SaaS applications clearly are no longer seen as a new deployment model by our survey base, with almost half of those surveyed affirming use of SaaS applications in their business for more than three years,” said Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner.

In terms of investment levels in SaaS solutions over the next two years, survey respondents gave encouraging responses for software and service providers, with on average 53 percent of organizations expecting to increase investment levels slightly and 19 percent significantly.

This fits with the mood we saw at Interop last week, with SaaS offerings and the rise of the cloud computing paradigm no longer seen as something novel, but rather as viable alternatives to traditional deployment models.

In terms of exactly what customers will be buying in the future, this IDC enterprise IT spending report predicts that customer spending on cloud IT services will be $42.3 billion by 2012, with infrastructure offerings such as Napera Insight second only to business applications.

More details are available in “User Survey Analysis: Software as a Service, Enterprise Application Markets, Worldwide, 2010,” on the Gartner website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=1337828.