Thanks to an email from Rishi Seth at Springboard Research, I have learned that decision-makers from small, medium and large enterprises across Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) have described lower cost of ownership as the most significant reason for adopting Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), ahead of other factors such as ease of use and management (see news release).
Springboard forecasts that the ANZ SaaS market will register a compounded annual growth rate of 55% between 2007-2011 and reach AUD 683 million – that’s about £300 million – by 2011.
Existing software is apparently a barrier to SaaS adoption. Half of Springboard’s survey respondents said they had no plans to adopt SaaS due to existing investments by their organizations in on-premise applications. Other reasons for not adopting SaaS included a lack of clarity about benefits of SaaS, lack of technological maturity and no business requirement.
SaaS deployment is also relatively immature. Most respondents are using SaaS applications in isolation; only 20% have integrated SaaS applications with traditional enterprise applications and fewer still have enabled integration between SaaS applications.