52% Of Developers Expecting SaaS Projects This Year

More than half of developers in a global survey said they expect to work on applications delivered in the software-as-a-service model during the next 12 months, a research firm said Monday.

Nearly 52% of the 1,300 developers interviewed said they expected to work on SaaS programs, with adoption expectations strongest in the Asia-Pacific region, Evans Data reported. Although expectations are highest in the East, the number of developers working on SaaS implementations is highest in North America.

In the United States and Canada, 30% of developers said SaaS is part of their current development efforts, Evans said. In Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, fewer developers are currently working on SaaS applications, but 53% expect to be doing so within 12 months.

"These SaaS results definitely reaffirm the success of this concept in replacing the traditional model of business applications being run in house with traditional software licenses," John Andrews, president and chief executive of Evans, said in a statement. "SaaS is delivering on the promise of rapid deployment, limited up-front investment in capital and staffing, plus a reduction in the software management responsibility all making SaaS a very desirable alternative to software on a user's premises."

Cloud computing has less traction that SaaS, the survey found. Fewer than 10% of developers use cloud services, but more than a quarter plan to use cloud services at some point. In the Asia-Pacific region, that number is almost half. The biggest obstacle to cloud computing is security, developers said.

The survey, which was conducted in fall 2008, also found that more than two-thirds of all developers, or 68%, spend some portion of their time writing rich Internet applications. However, only 2% of those developers do this exclusively.

In North America, 37% of the developers surveyed said their work currently involved some type of virtualization.

While installing SaaS applications is easy, integrating them can drive up the cost and complexity SaaS is supposed to avoid. InformationWeek has published an independent analysis of this topic. Download the report here (registration required).