SaaS Pushing Cloud Computing Market To $25 Billion

"A major shift in the way companies obtain software and computing capacity is under way as more companies tap into web-based applications," the report noted. "[The] worldwide cloud computing market is continuing to grow at a rapid rate and is expected to cross $25 billion by the end of 2013," the report continued.

With providers like Amazon Web Services, Salesforce.com, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft leading the change, cloud is taking hold. But the different segments of cloud computing, SaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) are showing different levels of maturity and adoption, the research found.

According to MarketResearch.com, SaaS is growing at a rate of 17.04 percent and by the end of 2009 was a $9 billion market. Within SaaS, the fastest growing segments are content, communications and collaboration; CRM; ERP; and Supply Chain Management. ERP and content, communications and collaboration combined contributed to 58 percent of the SaaS market in 2009. Also in 2009, the CRM market surpassed the $2 billion market while SaaS-based ERP sales crossed $1 billion by the end of last year. Supply Chain Management became an $850 million market in 2009, the report said.

In 2008, PaaS generated market revenue of roughly 1.5 percent of the total application development market. And IaaS is becoming increasingly popular with computing resource integrating as web services, enabling service providers to support a large number of customers with a single infrastructure. MarketResearch.com found that the PaaS market will hit $400 million by 2013. The IaaS market, meanwhile, will increase at a compound annual growth rate value of 52.53 percent for the period spanning 2010 to 2013.