SaaS & Future Of IT

Large corporations are becoming increasingly frustrated with the long deployment cycles, high costs, complicated upgrade processes and IT infrastructure demanded by traditional software applications. Many are realizing that the future of IT is moving away from data center, system and infrastructure management and more toward business process improvement. Software-as-a-service has become one of the fastest growing segments of the IT sector because it provides organizations with "turn-key" software solutions that can be implemented quickly, avoid incremental infrastructure costs and eliminate the ongoing administrative resources of traditional on-premise applications.

IDC predicts that the SaaS market will grow at a 21% (CAGR) during the next four years, reaching $10.7 billion worldwide in 2009. Leading Software-as-a-Service Vendors Form Consortium to Focus on Needs and Issues of Enterprise Customers. A broad-based consortium of leading "software-as-a-service" (SaaS) vendors are coming together to form the Enterprise SaaS Working Group, an to focus on the needs and issues of large organizations seeking to take advantage of on-demand technology solutions. By developing guidelines and defining the business case for enterprise- class SaaS implementations, the Working Group will help large private- and public-sector organizations better leverage on-demand solutions as part of their overall technology and business strategies. SaaS solutions are being broadly embraced by companies of all sizes for a variety of reasons - including reduced ownership costs, accelerated time-to-benefit, greater scalability, simplified remote access, and high availability. Larger enterprises, however, have specific requirements for SaaS implementations, ranging from security and regulatory compliance to integration and administrative control. The Enterprise SaaS Working Group will ensure that enterprise customers can find and effectively partner with SaaS vendors who can fulfill these requirements and thereby enable them to reap the significant benefits offered by hosted/on demand software solutions.