Worldwide software as a service (SaaS) revenue within the enterprise application software market is forecast to surpass $8.5 billion in 2010, up 14.1 percent from 2009 revenue of $7.5 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. The rapid adoption of SaaS has contributed to growth in varying degrees across the enterprise software markets. There will be a shift in total SaaS revenue from just over 10 percent of the combined markets in 2009, to more than 16 percent of these combined markets in 2014.
Adoption varies between and within markets, and although use is expanding to a wider range of applications and solutions, the most widespread use is still characterized by horizontal applications with common processes, among distributed virtual workforce teams and within Web 2.0 initiatives.
- Increased security and transparency in the process
- Better SLAs
- Open APIs to facilitate data portability
- Supporting open formats
- Ensuring that the software bloat from the traditional software era doesn’t translate into browser bloat in the SaaS era. To do this, vendors need to adopt open technologies like HTML5 and, also, work with browser vendors to make browsers leaner. One way they can do this is by participating in the development process of some of the open source browsers.