Software as service draws interest

Software as a service is forecast by Gartner to grow at 22.1 percent until 2011 for the aggregate enterprise application software markets — more than double the 9 percent growth rate expected in the market as a whole.

“By 2011, 63 percent of products in the software infrastructure market and 56 percent in the software application market will support web services and web 2.0 technologies,” Gartner reckons.

“We limited the forecast to the enterprise application software market because SaaS is a very hot topic in the application markets and in some markets, it’s an absolutely common way to deploy software,” says Sharon Mertz, research director of customer relationship management at Gartner.

“SaaS is more of an option now,” she says. “People are considering it more often when they’re looking at different application solutions. [They're] looking at it as their overall sourcing strategy — ‘is this right for me, or not?’ It’s just a much more important element in the market as time goes on. A lot of the processes [in a SaaS application] are more streamlined. It’s more repeatable, [and the] software isn’t really specific to any one company’s business.”

Read more at LinuxWorld