The emerging market for Web-based enterprise software

Abstract

Web-based enterprise software - sometimes referred to as "Software as a Service" (SaaS) or "on demand software" - is a major wave of innovation that introduces a new technical and economic model to enterprise software. The defining characteristics of web-based enterprise software are: a fully web-based user interface, hosted application deployment, a SaaS-based business model, and the use of a service-oriented architecture for integration. This study analyzes a sample of 108 companies currently offering SaaS-based products. In total, 35 different application types and 20 different combinations of revenue models were counted. Apparently, the market is still in an experimental phase, and truly dominant designs haven't emerged yet. Gross margins for SaaS-oriented companies are lower than for traditional software product companies, but still attractive at around 85%. The entrepreneurial activity in the sector is significant. More than 50% of the companies in the sample were founded in or after 2002, and almost 30% in the last two years. Venture capital continues to be an important source of capital with 36% of the companies having received VC investment, but an equally large percentage of companies are boot-strapped, i.e. have no formal source of outside capital.

(cont.) The data about customer adoption of web-based enterprise software is not very clear. Most studies suggest that SaaS accounted for about 5% of the CRM market in 2006, with other application types below that level. In total, SaaS probably doesn't even account for 1% of the global software market. However, customer willingness to adopt SaaS is apparently rising very quickly, and specialized SaaS companies are experiencing rapid growth. From the data available, it can't be decided unambiguously if web-based enterprise software is a truly disruptive model or merely an incremental innovation. Most characteristics point to a new-market disruption, i.e. an innovation that will bring new functionality to current non-users of advanced enterprise software.