SaaS continues to lead public cloud sales

In a statement last week, Salesforce.com said that the number of participants in the Dreamforce meeting was about 120,000, which is really impressive in terms of numbers alone, but it is hard to argue that this year's meeting is larger than last year's.

This is a good way to say that SaaS is still alive and driving the development of cloud computing, but on the other hand, SaaS has not received much attention in all the discussions about cloud computing.

On the contrary, many of us are talking about new things in thick clouds, namely, IaaS and PAAs. My colleagues and I are in the wrong.

The reality is that most users are using cloud technologies provided by SaaS providers, such as Salesforce.com and other vendors. Also, most enterprise-class software developers offer SaaS versions of their products.

SaaS continues to lead most public cloud sales. However, according to the Gemini TME Strategy Laboratory report, SaaS Market share will fall from 69% to 58%. Meanwhile, the overall cloud market will grow from $17.4 billion trillion in 2009 to $44.2 billion this year.

SaaS market share is falling because IaaS and PAAs are also growing. But SaaS is still the biggest chunk of the cloud market, though it does not generate too much media noise around it.

Ten years ago, when SaaS began to rise again from many failures in the 90 's, key applications and business processes could be a tempting idea to spend on subscriptions. Today, most companies are not expecting their own enterprise CRM system to be hosted on Salesforce.com. Moreover, their ERP systems, HR systems, warehousing systems, etc. are also provided in SaaS form. This has radically changed the pattern of our consumer software.

SaaS is not as appealing as other cloud concepts, but it will still be the biggest and perhaps the most important thing for many businesses. Although the cloud market is maturing, we should not overlook the fact.