Software-as-a-Service growing, providing choices for IT buyers
Thursday, December 08, 2011 4:51:26 PM
Software-as-a-Service continues to grow as enterprises pursue greater mobility and easier upgrades, but some experts believe SaaS is evolving and company IT buyers will need to keep up.
According to IDG News, Forrester Research analyst Liz Herbert recently examined SaaS and its past and future transformations. Herbert believes industry specialization, analytics and cloud orchestration, as well as social and mobile technology trends, will guide the future of SaaS, and IT managers will need to adapt accordingly.
"Some industry solutions will go beyond encapsulated best practices and code templates to include bundles of applications, either in a preconfigured, ready-to-go solution or in a cloud orchestration or marketplace model for a specific industry," Herbert said, as reported by the source. "For many organizations, the most valuable analytics will include industry- specific benchmarking data to compare themselves against, which some SaaS providers are starting to provide."
Herbert also said SaaS buyers must consider if mobile capabilities and social networking are important to their cloud strategy, and if those platforms should be integrated into more traditional applications.
According to a recent Gartner survey, 95 percent of organizations expect to sustain or increase their SaaS investments, and almost 70 percent of companies have used SaaS for fewer than three years.
-McAfee Cloud Security
