Two thirds of European enterprises to continue investment in SaaS
Worldwide Gartner survey shows that SaaS spending unlikely to slow down
Almost three quarter of enterprises in Europe are planning to continue investing in software as a service (SaaS), as cloud uptake quickens across the globe.
According to a survey of 556 organisations worldwide from analyst company, Gartner, showed that 71 percent of organisations had employed SaaS in the past three years.
In some regions adoption has been even more recent. In the fast growing economy of Brazil for example, 27 percent of those surveyed have had cloud software services put in place in just the past year.
In all parts of the world there is set to be further investment in the next two years, with 77 percent planning to spend more on SaaS, though the figure varies across regions. Europe and the US in particular have been early adopters of cloud services, though there is still room for more investment. Gartner said that 73 percent of US respondents were planning on further cloud spending in the next two years, alongside 71 percent of European enterprises.
In Brazil and Asia/Pacific countries there is likely to be more organisations investing in SaaS, with over 80 percent intending to spend as demand for the cloud grows rapidly in the regions.
Customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise content management (ECM) were highlighted as the most popular of the recently deployed applications.
As far as the US and Europe is concerned, the biggest driver for new SaaS deployments has been to replace on-premises applications. This means more avenues for cloud service providers to target sales among existing clients as they increase dependence on cloud software services. The most popular on premises applications were supply chain management, web conferencing, teaming platforms and social.
However Charles Eschinger, research vice president at Gartner, commented that it is unlikely that organisations would move all of their applications to the cloud.
“The decision to deploy SaaS-based applications within an enterprise is dependent on the business-criticality of the solution, as well as geography, business agility, usage scenario and IT architecture,” said Eschinger. “Few organisations will completely migrate to SaaS.”
He added: “These organisations will live with a mix of SaaS and traditional on-premises application deployment models with a focus on integration and migration between different deployment models.”