With cloud computing in the enterprise we tend to think of it as being conceptual and experimental. Besides Salesforce.com they aren’t a lot of popular examples of business apps in the cloud. However, a new Gartner report says that business spending on software as a service (SaaS) will rise 22% in 2009 to $9.6 billion.

This is up from $6.6 billion spent on SaaS in 2008 and it comes in a year when overall IT spending is down 3.8% according to Gartner estimates.

As the chart below from Gartner’s report shows, the most popular SaaS applications in the enterprise are content management, CRM, and ERP.

One of the fastest growing segments of the SaaS market is Office Suites, which is growing from $136 million in 2008 to $512 million in 2009. This means more companies are experimenting with solutions such as Google Apps and Zoho rather than using the standard Microsoft Office suite… More»