A new report from UK-based IT analyst company TechMarketView has predicted that software-as-a-service offerings will receive 15% of all UK software and IT services spending by 2012, up from 5% in 2009.

Businesses are dissatisfied with the poor returns delivered by traditional enterprise software, according to the report’s author Philip Carnelley. “Instead, organisations are opting for projects with a clear and fast ROI or the subscription model of software-as-a-service,” he said.

It is a trend that Carnelly expects to lead to greater diversity in the IT industry, and a wider of choices for IT buyers. “Companies like SAP are finding increasing resistance to its ‘one-stop shopping strategy’,” he said. “There is a new openness and we predict that there will be increasing platform diversity at both client and server. This in turn places new demands on software providers to respond accordingly if they are to maintain their market position.”

This could be good news for the UK’s own IT industry. Speakers at Information Age’s Hosting & Managed Services conference, which took place in London yesterday, discussed how legislation including the data protection act and payment card standard PCI DSS make it difficult for UK businesses to use US-based SaaS or cloud offerings.

This presents an opportunity for local providers to meet the demand that TechMarketView predicts will grow in the coming years, the conference heard.

A full report from the Hosting & Managed Services conference will appear in the