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23 Percent of North American, European Firms Use SaaS

A Forrester (News - Alert) Research survey of 1,000 firms in North America and Europe recently found that 23 percent of firms use software as a service, with 11 percent of these respondents indicating that they are expanding usage. An additional eight percent planned to implement SaaS (News - Alert) within a year’s time frame.

The greatest SaaS usage is in horizontal business process areas, such as customer relationship management or human relations, says Liz Herbert, Forrester Research (News - Alert) analyst.  But sales automation, customer support, recruiting and performance management in the cloud also are being used in a SaaS mode.

Some 18 percent of firms are already are using collaboration applications in the cloud, with an additional 21 percent planning to adopt cloud solutions for collaboration.

Specialized, industry specific processes, such as claims management in insurance or sale/VAT reporting for retail also are migrating to SaaS. 

As you would expect, cost savings were seen as a key benefit. Some 53 percent of survey respondents noted lower upfront costs as a key benefit and driver for SaaS adoption. Beyond the initial costs, 48 percent of survey respondents anticipatedlong-term costs savings by moving to SaaS.

At the same time, 46 percent of survey respondents cited faster access to new application features as a key benefit to SaaS. Also, 45 percent of firms cite faster time-to-market advantages.

Some 34 percent of respondents say that they get better support for remote and mobile users as well. Some 18 percent of survey respondents also said better customer satisfaction was a SaaS benefit.

SaaS products often are purchased by line of business executives. Some 56 percent of survey respondents indicate that business groups drive horizontal SaaS purchases, such as sales VPs buying “salesforce.com” or HR departments buying “Ultimate Software” or “SuccessFactors.”

Some 48 percent of firms say that IT developers drive purchases for application testing as a service. Additionally, 25 percent of IT developers lead the purchase of cloud solutions for integration or middleware, including solutions such as Amazon.com (News - Alert). 

About 20 percent of IT developers have bought business intelligence or analytics cloud solutions and 16 percent of IT developers have acquired platform-as-a-service.

Some 13 percent of survey respondents say external customers drive business process as a service purchases. Ten percent of firms say that external customers play a critical role in their adoption of industry-specific SaaS solutions such as claims processing.

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Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell