A good day for SaaS!

A report done by Access Market International Partners (AMI-Partners), and covered here by Redmond Mag states that Small to Medium Businesses are increasingly using SaaS solutions. The full report is here.

I won’t go into details, Redmond does a good job with that, but here are some figures that excited me:

• 21% of Small Businesses and 31% of Medium Businesses use SaaS (Small Business is defined as 1-99 employees and Medium Business is 100-999 employees)
• Reasons that businesses claimed for using SaaS: ease of use, i.e. easy to manipulate, configure, and maintain; and keeping costs low, such as infrastructure costs
• Medium Businesses spent 6 times more than Small Businesses on SaaS
• Medium Businesses are twice as likely to increase spending on SaaS over the next year
• Small Businesses mostly use: banking/finance, instant messaging, and payroll processing applications.
• Medium Businesses mostly use: payroll processing, banking/finance, and human resources management.

More after the jump.

Funny that this report comes as we discuss if SaaS will eliminate the IT department. One reason for which these business switch is because they don’t have the resources to house an IT department, and SaaS greatly helps them in that area. In fact, one of the reasons why Large Business have not switched to SaaS at this rate is because they already have the IT resources (infrastructure and staff), and everything is set up to their particular specifications.

The report also says that SaaS vendors have to work harder at educating the public (especially SMBs) about the benefits of SaaS. I agree with this. SaaS is relatively “new” to the general public, and as we all know people are afraid of change. Education is always a good thing.

It is exciting to see the word getting through and companies jumping on board!