Global spending on SaaS is expected to reach $45.6B by 2017,
according to industry
estimates. SaaS is often used by line-of-business leaders who are
looking to deploy technology to rapidly provide their teams with needed
functionality, increase productivity and address new market opportunities. In
fact, industry
analysts estimate that by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than
CIOs, while Forrester reports that 65 percent of business leaders have plans to
buy technology for their group without involving IT at all.
However, circumventing IT to deploy SaaS without provisioning
and securing it first can have unintended consequences, and IBM’s study
suggests that organizations in which IT and business leaders work together to
select, secure and deploy SaaS applications are in fact the ones who deliver
the greatest value to their organization. Further, organizations that are
gaining the most out of their SaaS deployments are more likely to see it as a
critical piece of their enterprise cloud strategy when compared to their peers.
Nearly one in five companies that responded to IBM’s survey
has deployed SaaS broadly and is now gaining competitive advantage as a result.
By developing mature and cohesive enterprise-wide SaaS strategies, these
Pacesetter organizations are able to improve market agility, achieve a deeper
level of collaboration and make better decisions than their peers.
Specifically, compared to peers that are newer or less advanced with their SaaS
adoption, Pacesetters are:
-- 79 percent more likely to
have increased collaboration across their organization and ecosystem through
SaaS
-- More than twice as likely
to have leveraged analytics across the organization to turn big data into
insights using SaaS
-- More than twice as likely
to have increased innovation using SaaS
More information on CRM and SaaS can be found at www.CRMindustry.com