According to a recent survey carried out by Rackspace Hosting, customer demand for hosted services is expected to rise in the coming five years. Almost 70 percent of respondents in the customer survey were of the view they would outsource more IT functions to hosting, software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) or cloud service providers during the next five years.

 

Almost 50 percent of customer respondents indicated that their spending on hosting is also likely to increase. At present, 47 percent of respondents spend between 0 and 20 percent of their IT budget on hosted services, while 30 percent of respondents spend 30-50 percent.

 

“Two thirds of the survey respondents use a services provider to host one or more of their SaaS applications today and the data indicates that demand is likely to increase,” said John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace Hosting, in a statement.

 

An important benefit of outsourcing IT functions to a hosting provider is that it saves a considerable amount of time. More than 40 percent of respondents said that through outsourcing they could save 30-50 percent of their time. Almost 75 percent revealed that they can spend 25 percent more time on new projects by outsourcing their hosting requirements.

 

Rackspace sent out an e-mail survey to approximately 1,600 of its U.S.-based, and almost seven percent of survey recipients responded.