This week Gartner issued forecasts for both the enterprise SaaS market and the enterprise social software market. Both are predicted to finish 2010 with strong growth and see even more growth next year. Revenue growth in enterprise SaaS and social software is evidence of three of the five biggest enterprise trends of the year: cloud, consumerization and social (the others are analytics and mobile). But some of Gartner’s findings are surprising.
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On Tuesday Gartner forecast that spending on enterprise SaaS will hit $9.2 billion in 2010, up 15.7% from 2009’s $7.9 billion in revenue. Gartner expects the enterprise SaaS market will total $10.7 billion in 2011, a 16.2% increase from 2010.
Today, Gartner forecast enterprise social software revenue for 2010 will total $664.4 million, a 14.9 percent increase from last year’s $578.2 million. The firm predicts that the enterprise social software market will reach reach $769.2 million in revenue next year, up 15.7 percent from this year.
Gartner analyst Sharon Mertz says that initially security concerns regarding SaaS in the enterprise have diminished and SaaS businesses and computing models have matured.
Some of the other trends Gartner has observed:
- More enterprises are procuring SaaS solutions without IT involvement, which creates new management issues and challenges
- SaaS deployments are getting larger. There are more deals for thousands or tens of thousands of users.
- Strangely, social software has the lowest adoption rate by enterprises that purchase SaaS solutions.
- Content, communications and collaboration (for example, web conferencing) solutions are the top selling type of SaaS, with a predicted revenue of $2.9 in 2010.
Gartner analysts emphasized that SaaS should be differentiated from other cloud services, such as hosting or application management.
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