Gartner analysts will address SaaS trends at their upcoming conference on outsourcing. They believe that the scale of change that SaaS will produce requires providers to make changes soon, if they want to keep ahead of the SaaS wave.
As the market for software as a service (SaaS) continues to pick up steam, the worldwide SaaS market reached $6.3 billion in 2006 and is forecast to grow to $19.3 billion by year-end 2011, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner describes SaaS as hosted software based on a single set of common code and data definitions that are consumed in a one-to-many model by all contracted customers, at any time, on a pay-for-use basis, or as a subscription based on usage metrics.
