Software as a Service (SaaS) could well be a favourable business investment to explore in recessionary times and has been driven by the need to find cost-effective, beneficial ways to run businesses.

A recent Gartner report stated that SaaS revenue in the enterprise application market was on pace to surpass 6.4-billion dollars, and that the market is expected to more than double with SaaS revenue reaching 14.8-billion dollars in 2012.

According to the report, adoption of SaaS is growing and evolving within the enterprise application market as new entrants challenge incumbents, popularity increases and interest for platform as a service grows.

SaaS is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. This type of on-demand licensing and use alleviates the customer’s burden of equipping a device with every conceivable application and reduces traditional End User License Agreement software maintenance, patches and support complexity within organisations.

Ultimately, in the future all software will be Web-based and accessed through various devices by users, an approach which, compared to investing in on-premises solution, minimises costs, reduces time to delivery, alleviates upfront cash-outlay and allows for OPEX verses CAPEX budget allocations. SaaS also reduces maintenance issues and increases the frequency of release of upgrades along with a host of additional benefits.

One of the more prominent roles SaaS will play in today’s business arena is enabling the remote workforce and, as ongoing research conducted by World Wide Worx and the forecasts that can be assumed based on current trends show, by 2015 there will be approximately 15-million remote or mobile Internet users and 42-million cellular users in South Africa.

Bandwidth proliferation, coupled with the fact that Internet as a platform is widely trusted, makes for a favourable SaaS environment and we envision high levels of adoption over the coming months. Technical advances like Cloud Computing, H(ardware)aaS, P(latform)aaS and virtualisation are also indicators of future growth in this arena.

Early adopters are already dominating the arena and, while SaaS has yet to win over the majority, it correlates directly to the general global trends of ‘self everything’ – self marketing, automated sign ups and so on.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that in a downturn economy, when cost saving is the priority of the day, that SaaS shares have been hurt less than others. Companies with proven track records in the SaaS arena,like salesforce.com, 37signals and Ning, are experiencing high levels of success in hard times and it is this success should be the final convincer that SaaS investment makes good sense.

For more on Software as a Service, interested readers can visit Pete Flynn’s SaaS focused blog: http://saaspert.com or watch a his recent presentation on this topic at Net Prophet.