Nearly 90 per cent of 258 organisations worldwide intend to maintain or grow their software-as-a-service (SaaS) usage, a Gartner survey has found.
The analyst firm also predicted Australia will catch up with the world's early SaaS adopters over the coming years with ease and speed of deployment, along with cost-effectiveness cited as primary motivators for adoption.
Research Director at Gartner, Denise Ganley, said that while Australians weren’t strong early adopters, she expected them to catch up with North America and Europe.
“We’re probably amongst the earliest adopters [within Asia-Pacific] because our IT costs tend to be fairly high and we tend to have very limited resources that we can throw at this. So where we can look at things like spending operational budget rather than capital budget, that is a very attractive proposition,” she said.
“Some of the changes in tax laws that we have had here this year had a direct impact on on-premise software, it made SaaS offerings more attractive.”
Gartner’s June/July survey questioned individuals directly involved with implementation, planning and budget allocation for enterprise application software in eight major countries worldwide.
The SaaS model has become increasingly popular with more than 40 per cent of organisations using SaaS for more than three years, showing a growing fluency with the model within the user base.
But in both Europe and North America, 15 per cent of respondents expect new SaaS investments to increase significantly, compared to just 5 per cent in Asia-Pacific.
However, 50 per cent of Asia-Pacific respondents were transitioning from a current on-premises solution to a SaaS solution, compared to a 37 per cent average worldwide, indicating the region is beginning to catch up with the early adopters, especially in Australia.
“We are [catching up]. Part of it is the SaaS providers actually getting the infrastructure out here – the datacentres and the communications and all of that – to adequately provide for us and we’re seeing that happen. And also actually starting to change the mindset of the buyers from ‘it has to be on-premise’ to ‘it can be out in the cloud’. That certainly is helping,” Ganley said.
