This week, Gartner predicted that worldwide SaaS revenues would grow by 18 percent in 2009. From our perspective, this aggressive prediction – totally at odds with the generally gloomy economic picture – is quite right. Salesforce, the SaaS industry bellwether, continues to grow revenues above 20%, and Microsoft is experiencing very rapid SaaS growth, albeit from a lower base.
Here at Intermedia we are also growing faster than this, but our partners are far exceeding the 18% figure. Exchange and related services revenues for our private label Exchange hosting partners are growing in the region of 65 % per year – and this should only increase further with the recent launch of hosted Exchange 2010.
Gartner does break out different segments of SaaS. Intermedia would fall under the ‘content, communications and collaboration’ group (try saying that 10 times, quickly!), which is predicted to grow around 20% in 2009. Outsourcing business email and unified communications is a logical step for many companies, and often a ‘first taste’ of how well it can work to outsource critical systems to specialist companies.
It seems then that SMBs – which we serve here at Intermedia – are adopting SaaS more rapidly than the market at large. Still, the 18% growth rate for SaaS across the board is still impressive, especially in light of Gartner’s prediction of a 5.2% decline for IT spending as a whole in 2009.
