Technology News and Insights
By Bill Vass
Hello faithful readers. As many of you know by now, I've recently been writing about the changing stack of technologies that IT professionals face. As part of that stack, last month I wrote about storage and identity-enabled ILM. This month I plan to wrap up discussion of the individual elements in that stack.
In this letter, I plan to turn my attention software as a service (SaaS) — an exciting delivery model for software. In the most basic terms, SaaS involves delivering and receiving software as bytes over the Internet instead of buying and installing software locally as bits.
Given the recent hoopla over SaaS, it is no exaggeration to say that it has been a big hit in many areas. Many consumers use SaaS every day with services like Google, Yahoo!, and eBay, but now those services and many others in the ERP space are moving into the enterprise. In case there are still any SaaS doubters, let's take a moment to examine some of the numbers.
According to IDC, spending on SaaS hit $4.2 billion in 2004, which represents an annual growth rate of 39 percent. Furthermore, IDC claims that in a survey of 500 organizations, 79 percent have purchased or were reviewing SaaS offerings. And, 65 percent of businesses with between 100 and 10,000 employees believe that SaaS will have a significant impact on the way they purchase software during the coming year.
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