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by Chris Chiappinelli, MA Editorial Staff Posted on Sunday, November 25, 2007 5:00:00 AM Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox    | Abstract: | As new vendors join the party and established players tackle concerns over the model's lack of customization, software-as-a-service gains serious attention as a lower-cost alternative to complex licensing agreements. |
| Keywords: | SaaS delivery model, software-as-a-service delivery model |
Today the market for business applications delivered across the Internet as services is a healthy one, and only getting healthier as it feeds on what analysts say will be a steady diet of new subscriptions in coming years. This burgeoning brand of software delivery is a latter-day twist on the hosted applications model that fell out of favor with the dot-com bust. Although businesses can still find plenty of vendors that will host their ERP or other applications off-site, the alluring wrinkle in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model is that all the businesses using the application tap into the same instance of the software, a shared model that allows providers to lower the cost of ownership. In fact, so alluring are applications delivered as a service, or on-demand, that in 2006, research firm Gartner predicted that they will account for 25% of the business software market by the year 2011. In a more recent research report, Gartner said that on-demand enterprise applications — which it defined as CRM; ERP; SCM; digital content creation and office suites; and content, communication, and collaboration tools — are expected to top $5.1 billion in sales in 2007 and continue to gain steam through 2011, when Gartner says they will produce $11.5 billion in revenue. [Click to continue] |
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