Mobility Is the No. 1 Driver of Enterprise SaaS Adoption

Enterprises are moving to the cloud, according to Yankee Group's 2011 US FastView: Cloud Computing Survey. Remote/mobile user connectivity was the top motivation for deploying software as a service (SaaS), cited by 48 percent of enterprises--a 92 percent increase over 2010. With mobility as an impetus, 38 percent of enterprises project the deployment of over half of their software applications on a cloud platform within three years compared to just 11 percent today.

Other survey findings include:

-- Public versus private argument is dead. Adoption is up across the board, with private cloud still most widely deployed (63 percent) but public cloud and managed public cloud making gains (58 percent and 51 percent, respectively).

-- PaaS is gaining momentum. In 2011, 41 percent of very large enterprises (more than 10,000 employees) have already deployed or are considering deployment of platform as a service (PaaS) within the next 12 months, compared to just 32 percent in 2010.

-- Consumerization is profoundly impacting enterprise IT. Seventy-five percent of respondents agree that consumer apps put more pressure on IT to make enterprise applications more like consumer applications.

More information on cloud computing can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

Worldwide Software as a Service Revenue Is Forecast to Grow 21 Percent in 2011

Worldwide software as a service (SaaS) revenue is forecast to reach $12.1 billion in 2011, a 20.7 percent increase from 2010 revenue of $10 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. The SaaS-based delivery will experience healthy growth through 2015, when worldwide revenue is projected to reach $21.3 billion..

Gartner defines SaaS as software that is owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers. The provider delivers an application based on a single set of common code and data definitions, which is consumed in a one-to-many model by all contracted customers anytime on a pay-for-use basis, or as a subscription based on use metrics.

During the past two years, the significant industry buzz surrounding SaaS and other off-premises models has shifted to cloud computing. Cloud computing is a broad concept, of which SaaS is only one variation, representing the application layer of the overall cloud architectural stack. However, SaaS has been a lead indicator of the cloud concept for some time. Gartner estimates that 75 percent of current SaaS delivery, as measured by revenue, could be regarded as cloud services, and this could exceed 90 percent by 2015 as the SaaS model matures and converges with cloud service models.

Customer relationship management (CRM) continues to be the largest market for SaaS. SaaS revenue within the CRM market is forecast to reach $3.8 billion in 2011, up from $3.2 billion in 2010. Gartner expects SaaS to represent nearly 32 percent of the CRM market's total software revenue in 2011.

SaaS revenue within the content, communications and collaboration (CCC) market is on pace to surpass $3.3 billion in 2011, up from $2.8 billion in 2010. The CCC market continues to show the widest disparity of SaaS revenue generation, with SaaS representing just 5 percent of enterprise content management (ECM) in 2010 but approximately 83 percent of Web conferencing.

The proportion of enterprise resource planning (ERP) revenue attributed to SaaS overall is still in the single digits, at approximately 7 percent of the overall ERP market. ERP SaaS offerings contributed approximately $1.5 billion to the SaaS market in 2010, and by year-end 2011, Gartner expects this to increase to $1.7 billion. The penetration of SaaS within ERP varies greatly between subsegments, with human capital management (HCM) being the most penetrated (in terms of adoptions and revenue growth) and enterprise asset management (EAM) and manufacturing being relatively unaffected by SaaS.

More information on Software as a Service can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

IT Managers Have Their Heads in the Clouds: Worldwide Cloud Server Revenue to Reach $9.4 Billion by 2015

Eager to simplify their current IT environments and introduce new initiatives to enhance overall business value, IT leaders are embracing server cloud computing as a viable option for decreasing complexity by adopting converged systems that arrive pre-integrated and ready for use (private cloud) or are offsite entirely (public cloud). According to new research from International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide revenue for servers deployed to public clouds will reach $3.6 billion in 2015 while private cloud server revenue will balloon to $5.8 billion.

IDC's research found that public clouds are generally being built on simpler server hardware with a focus on energy efficiency, density, and cost control. The reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) for public clouds tends to be built into the software layer (through failover and virtualization). As a result, public cloud computing is a unit story with lower average selling values (ASVs) than an average x86-based server. IDC forecasts the number of servers shipped for deployment in public clouds will reach more than 1.2 million in 2015, representing a 2011-2015 compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.1%. 

More information on cloud computing can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.