SaaS - Your time has come!!

I read an interesting article on cnet news today. The headline read "IDC lowers IT spending forecast for 2009". As the headline was all doom and gloom, and this was the current flavour of the season, I had to read it and so I did.

The article mentioned that worldwide IT spending would grow by 2.6% as compared to IDC's earlier projection of 5.9%. The forecast also says that "With the exception of storage, hardware will be the hardest hit by the spending cutbacks, while software and services will be relatively safer". The spending is expected to be back to 6% by "2012". So now you know when you can take that vacation again!!

Which brings me to another different but unrelated article. In a survey done by Thinkstrategies / Cutter Consortium, results have indicated there is a distinct surge in the market for SaaS products and a rise in Customer Satisfaction indices.

This again brings the focus back to SaaS. With its low setup costs, short implementation time-frame and ability to walk-out easily if not satisfied, the model is steadily gaining acceptance. Now more and more vendors, products and organizations are crossing the bridge. After being on the fringes for quite some time as ASP and SaaS now, it does look the time and environment has become quite conducive for SaaS to be adopted in a big way!!

Note: As as a strong believer in the SaaS model, our organization has released our flagship Leave and Payroll on a SaaS platform. More details are available here.