A new report from market research and IT consultancy firm Gartner (News - Alert) leaves little doubt about the rising popularity of Web-based software among SMBs and enterprises.

The firm’s report, “Market Trends: Software as a Service, Worldwide, 2008-2013, Update,” estimates that global software-as-a-service revenue will reach $7.5 billion this year, a 17.7 percent increase from 2008 revenue of $6.4 billion.

Gartner predicts the SaaS (News - Alert) market will show consistent growth through 2013 when worldwide SaaS revenue will total more than $14 billion for the enterprise application markets.

In May Gartner had predicted that the global SaaS market would reach $8 billion in 2009, a 21.9 percent increase from 2008 revenue, which it had then pegged at $6.6 billion. This is an updating of that report.

"The adoption of SaaS continues to grow and evolve within the enterprise application markets,” said Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner, in a release. “The composition of the worldwide SaaS landscape is evolving as vendors continue to extend regionally, increase penetration within existing accounts and ‘greenfield’ opportunities, and offer more-vertical-specific solutions as part of their service portfolio or through partners.”

“Adoption of the on-demand deployment model has continued to grow as on-demand vendors have extended their services through alliances, partner offerings, and more recently, by offering and promoting user application development through platform as a service (PaaS) capabilities,” added Mertz. “Although usage and adoption is still evolving, deployment of SaaS still varies between the enterprise application markets and within specific market segments because of buyer demand and applicability of the solution.”

According to the report, the content, communications and collaboration (CCC) market and the customer relationship management (CRM) market had the largest share of SaaS revenue, with the CCC market generating $2.6 billion in 2009, up from $2.14 billion in 2008, and the CRM segment generating $2.3 billion in 2009, up from $1.9 billion in 2008.

The report finds that SaaS-based CRM and ERP solutions make up the bulk of SaaS revenues – however, also contributing to the growth in the SaaS market are today’s SaaS-based call center solutions. A recent report from market research firm DMG Consulting arrives at similar findings and predicts that the SaaS-based call center software market will grow 30 percent in 2009, 35 percent in 2010 and 20 percent in 2011.

As the DMG report points out, companies are turning to hosted call center solutions because they can be deployed quickly and easily and with much lower up-front capital investment. With hosted call center solutions, organizations can avoid the need to purchase expensive hardware, software licenses and network infrastructure – all they need are the computers and a high speed connection. In addition, the software is delivered as a managed service, which means the vendor is responsible for maintaining all equipment, architecture and software – thus reducing the burden on a company’s IT department.

DMG’s findings reveal that the worldwide economic recession is actually driving many types of organizations in all verticals to consider hosted call center infrastructure solutions over expensive on-premises based systems.

“It is interesting to note that many of these companies are not risk takers in the classic sense, but rather companies that see hosting as an opportunity to do business differently, without a significant initial investment,” DMG states.

Contactual is a leading provider of SaaS-based call center software. To learn more about the company and its solutions, click here.