Brian PrenticeA consistent theme that appears in any discussion around Software as a Service (SaaS) is the extent to which these products are brought into organization by business users rather than IT departments. Based on my interactions with clients this is clearly the situation in a majority of cases – and this is consistently confirmed to me by the providers of SaaS solutions.
So, in the current economic environment, we may be finding ourselves in a situation where cuts to IT budgets don’t accurately reflect to the true impact to IT use in most organizations – particularly if the cost of SaaS solutions are being paid from departmental budgets rather than those of IT.
Now, I don’t want to overplay this scenario. It’s not like SaaS is a massive component of everyone’s total IT spend. But the overall market numbers aren’t exactly insignificant. In the CRM space, Gartner estimates that SaaS accounts for roughly 15% of the total market. SaaS has significant market share in areas like e-Recruitment, employee performance management, enterprise feedback management and is growing quickly in areas like multi-channel campaign management. Overlay these growth rates with the extent to which business users are in the driver’s seat and I think we have an interesting phenomena.
At the heart of this is yet further proof of the desire of business users to take control of their own IT destiny. I know that this is a tough challenge for IT departments. But with IT budgets being squeezed at the same time that 80% of it is being used just to “keep the lights on” it might be making sense for IT departments to stop looking this gift horse in the mouth.
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