SaaS Trends in 2013

With the start of the new financial year, it is time to assess and analyze all that 2013 gave us. This post focuses on the trends and leads that SaaS development has seen in the year gone by. Businesses are continually looking for new paradigms for sourcing software functionality and Software as a Service (SaaS) is a technology that helps businesses achieve exactly this and much more. Cloud hosted or web delivered SaaS has several benefits, which are –

• Scalability
• Improved efficiency of the company’s processes
• Optimization of the company’s IT budget

Some of the trends that this technology has seen in the year 2013 are –

Mobile Continues to Rule
The one revolution that has taken the world by a storm in the past decade or so is the Mobile Revolution. Mobile technology and its evolution has affected the SaaS drive notably. The services that are most in demand these days are for mobile applications and for mobile marketing purposes. A drift from the desktop model to the 4-G capable environment is clearly visible and considered more right and relevant for users. The services, which have shown a drift, include internal business software and consumer services.Increased Spending of the U.S. Customers and Emerging Markets’s Customers

The year 2013 saw a considerable increase in the growth, in popularity and use of SaaS, in emerging markets. An OpenView item that was published in Jan 2013 projected a growth rate of as much as 25% for the year. While the American customers increased their tech spending, the tech spending in the European countries went low as compared to what they were the year 2012.Japan and China also saw a steady increase in their tech spending.

Cloud Hosting and PaaS

PaaS is also gaining immense popularity lately. Used as a web delivered software serving as a platform as far as functionality is concerned, Platform as a Service is used within the realm of SaaS. The beauty of this system is the fact that it is capable of supporting the development and several different forms of engineering.

In fact,Antony Kosner in his article for the Forbes Magazine, PaaStermed PaaS as a rentable backend platform. This means that the developers can access the environment for development of mobile applications easily. Therefore, it has an impact on the future markets of SaaS.

Key Industry Players
From an analysis of the market, Parrallels, Workday, Salesforce.com, Microsoft and SAP have emerged as leaders in the SaaS landscape. Although, most of these names may not be the first choice of the clients, they are still the popular providers when it comes to specific services. Their demand is realized by business leaders and executives who are capable of figuring out the kind of services or web-delivered platform, which are unique to these industry leading companies, can do for them.Replacing Internal IT Departments

Although, it is a point that is considered integral to the SaaS system, it is worth mentioning that the use of a SaaS option replaces an ‘internal IT model’. The delivered option is customized, by the local technical department, to suit the requirements of the business concerned. Therefore, the use of SaaS makes the IT departments lean as issues like upgrades and fixes can be simply transferred to the vendor.

As a business, what will you prefer – buying monthly subscriptions for software solutions or buying them in entirety? Quite obviously, monthly arrangement looks like a cost-effective approach, which is an option that only SaaS provides. You have to realize that businesses are experiencing a technological change at the moment and the fact that a SaaS approach is capable of supporting any form of business approach is the reason why the popularity of SaaS has increased by leaps and bounds in 2013.