23/10/2008

Global software-as-a-service (SaaS) income for the enterprise application market will pass $6.4 billion in 2008, an increase of more than a quarter (27 per cent) from last year's total of $5.1 billion, according to a report.

Gartner expects that, by 2012, the figure will have doubled, reaching $14.8 billion.

The firm cites new companies in the markets challenging the existing stakeholders and a growing interest in platform as a service as driving the growth.

'The popularity of the on-demand deployment model has increased significantly within the last four years,' said Gartner research director Sharon Mertz.

'Initial concerns over security, response time, and service availability have diminished for many organisations as SaaS business and computing models have matured and adoption has become pervasive.'

Last month, Silicon.com reported on a BT survey which found that SaaS was not in most businesses' future plans.

Some 81 per cent of respondents said they did not know much about the technology and had not thought about using it at their company.