Revenue for the worldwide software-as-a-service (SaaS) market will grow by 18% in 2012 to $14.5 billion, according to new research from Gartner
The SaaS market will be worth $14.5 billion in 2012, and is expected to expand up to $22.1 billion by 2015. That 2015 figure is an increase of almost $1 billion from the prediction Gartner made last year.
SaaS adoption in 2012 will be driven by the growth of the platform-as-a-service developer communities, Gartner said, as well as a growing interest in cloud computing.
Organisations most commonly use SaaS for horizontal applications (i.e. applications that address business divisions, rather than specific industries) with common processes, Gartner said, but added that there was increasing interest in vertical-specific offerings.
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Sharon Mertz, a Gartner research director, said the issues holding back SaaS deployments varied strongly by region. "Limited flexibility of customisation and limited integration to existing systems are the primary reasons in North America," she said. "In EMEA, network instability is the issue most frequently encountered, whereas longer-than-expected deployments are the top issue in Asia/Pacific."
Gartner said it is seeing increasing penetration of North American SaaS vendors into the WEstern European market, forecasting Western Europe’s SaaS revenues to surpass $3.2 billion this year, up 35% from $2.7 billion in 2011.
