An interesting article from Direct Response Limited:

Based on research by CMS Watch, the adoption of SaaS for content management is gathering speed at a much slower pace in Europe than it is in the United States.

The news isn’t all that bad, demand is on the rise for both software-as-a-service and installed software in both geographical areas. The problem is that international boundaries in Europe make proliferation of SaaS a little bit harder at this point; the USA is one country compared to Europe’s 48.

“National boundaries seem to matter more when providing hosted services as opposed to software products”, says Janus Boye a CMS Watch analyst.

These results seem logical, and I think they might be valid for all SaaS companies, not just CMS. Here’s why:

Obviously, the primary cause is that Europe is made up of many small countries. Each country has its own culture, its own language, its own media. Therefore a SaaS company will have to step through a couple of hurdles:

• Translate its product into a number of different languages. A doable task, but effort is required. Would a start-up be doing this off the get-go?
• Infiltrate the media of each country separately. Since each country has its own media system, the SaaS company would need to advertise in each country separately, and in that country’s language. Sure, this is the Internet we are talking about, but maybe advertising has to be done separately for yahoo.de and yahoo.it.
• Each country will have a different mentality and psychology on how to use a certain SaaS application, thus maybe something as simple as where buttons appear might need to be altered a little.
• Each country might already be using a competitor’s product who is native to that country, thus making proliferation just a little tougher.
• The laws of each country might also provide another barrier for the SaaS company to consider before launching.

So even though traveling between the borders of EU countries might be a piece of cake, proliferation of online software between borders is not as simple. These are just my thoughts on why the research results sound plausible. But there are exceptions. For example, many Europeans that would have to use certain SaaS software are likely to already know English; in that case is language that much of a barrier?