Posted on March 8, 2013, by Goran Čandrlić | 4 minute read
Software as a Service (SaaS) is a growing one from 2010, and will allegedly continue to be one, all through to 2015.
Staff.com created an infographic to summarize the state of this industry. And why is it so? The software operated from the cloud significantly reduces costs of paying licensed software copies, the maintenance is simple, and all new updates and features are automatically added online.
According to the infographic, the global SaaS revenue should climb to 21.3 billion dollars by 2015.
See below what are the top SaaS companies, what are their acquisitions, and how is SaaS growing in comparison with the sales of packaged software.
At the beginning of the year, SearchCloudComputing asked experts in cloud computing, and their contributors, about what they can foresee in the computing market in 2013.
"Software as a Service (SaaS) will see heavy gains as more customers realize the value of renting software," says Bill Claybrook. "Big data and media services will be the big technologies of 2013. Everyone is busy with IaaS implementations, but that is not "hot" anymore," says Mark Eisenberg.
Roger Jennings sees growth to all cloud services: SaaS, PaaS and IaaS combined. David Linthicum sees more PaaS-based development projects in the future, guesses on who will be the big winners, and insists on focusing on building more secure applications and on cloud performance management.
Find out more and hear from other cloud experts at SearchCloudComputing
CIO evaluated a list of 150 suggested cloud startups to watch, and came up with a list of top 10. "The Top 10 mixes track record with potential," writes Jeff Vance.
After narrowing down the list to 25, they let the readers vote on Startup50. The startups, according to CIO, are ranked as follows:
Supposedly, these have the greatest potential to shape, or will shape, how the cloud computing market will evolve. Some criteria were; "Is it something people are really willing to pay for?," "how unique is the offering?," "how high is the barrier to entry for other competitors?," "have they raised funding, and from whom?," "what is their location?," "have they set their roadmap straight?."
Find more detailed results from CIO
IBM announced on March 4th, that all of its cloud services and software will from now on be based on an open cloud architecture. "Without industry-wide open standards for cloud computing, businesses will not be able to fully take advantage of the opportunities associated with interconnected data, such as mobile computing and business analytics," it is stated in their press release.
IBM presented their private cloud offering, based on OpenStack software. “History has shown that open source and standards are hugely beneficial to end customers and are a major catalyst for innovation," said Robert LeBlanc, IBM senior vice president of software.
The new, IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator software, according to the release, is based on such customer-driven requirements.
“Cloud solutions are compelling for a variety of reasons – scale, flexibility and value – particularly for companies looking to do more with less. However, it’s difficult to understand, monitor and correlate all the application data points that tell you how and when you need to scale your application,” said Bob Kelly, Microsoft corporate vice president.
MetricsHub is a cloud monitoring startup, and was previously a participant in the Microsoft Windows Azure Accelerator. Founded by Charles Lamanna, ex Microsoft engineer, they developed a technology that automates cloud performance management. As from now, it is acquired by Microsoft.
MetricsHub announced that it would make its premium service available to Windows Azure customers for free.
