To add to fuel to an ongoing discussion of whether SaaS will replace IT, here’s some more food for thought.

In this article published by the Washington Post, Forrestor Research interviewed 1000 IT Decision Makers and here’s what they found.

• 16% of respondents say they have already deployed SaaS or are currently piloting such an application
• Those interested in deploying SaaS remained the same at 46% compared to last year
• Companies who are NOT interested in SaaS fell from 41% to 37%

Some may argue that the Enterprise isn’t interested in SaaS, but I think these numbers are excellent. It doesn’t mean that the Enterprise isn’t interested. Most enterprise customers are slow moving. These customers are pragmatists. They don’t like taking risks by implementing new technologies. So what do they do? They WAIT and they all have the attitude of “We’ll wait until Oracle comes out with Siebel On-Demand” or, “Well SAP has something in their road map so we’ll wait”.

The fact that nearly 50% of 1000 respondents are interested SaaS is a good sign. Most of them are just watching. They want to see a couple of large implementations succeed first. My bet is that the adoption of hosted solutions will be a slow and steady process. We’re not going to see everybody jump on the bandwagon overnight. Over time we’ll see more and more IT departments implementing a SaaS application.