The Software as a Service or SaaS market is reportedly growing but is still relatively small. 6% of the software sales in ‘07 was SaaS and this is expected to grow to 15-18% in 5 years - which is still small. This, according to the OpSource Summit. Gartner expects SaaS to grow at 22.1 percent until 2011 for the aggregate enterprise application software markets and predicts that 63 percent of products in the software infrastructure market and 56 percent in the software application market will support Web services.

A panelist at the summit described SaaS as the thin edge of the web for utility computing. They went on to say that objections to SaaS in the enterprise are still quite high despite it being an important way to deliver critical functionality without having to maintain the apps internally, being able to push out upgrades on a continuous way, and having a low TCO.

Some of the top SaaS providers include:

• Salesforce.com - CRM solutions provider
• Adobe - looking at bringing Photoshop online
• Netsuite - another CRM solutions provider
• SuccessFactors - talent management solution
• Axentis - governance, risk and compliance solutions provider

Somewhat surprisingly, Microsoft is also in the Saas space. Other companies in this space are Oracle, IBM, and SAP. There are also others that provide web-based content management systems and analytics solutions. Clearly, this area has a lot of teeth. There is nothing worse than teams using different versions of the same software giving rise to file incompatibility issues.