Only 8% of the 300 UK IT senior staffers surveyed said they would choose a hosted or SaaS application, if available. On the flip side, similarly low numbers of companies (10%) said they preferred to build their own in-house applications.
Although small at the moment, the market for SaaS is set to grow rapidly. IT analyst firm Gartner estimated in August that the global market for SaaS was worth $4.2bn in 2006 and this was set to expand by 21% to reach $5.1bn this year. By 2011, it expected the market to top $11.5bn.
While areas such as web conferencing and e-learning had a high SaaS penetration, Gartner found that enterprise applications was a harder sell. Enterprise content management and web search only make up 1% and 2% of overall SaaS sales.
Rather than a hosted solution, a sizeable chunk of respondents (29%) in the CBR survey chose to buy oven-ready client-server applications. But by far the largest proportion (52%) made decisions to build, buy, or host on a case-by-case basis.
