David Terrar addresses a recent Gartner analysis of SaaS trends. Quoting Ben Pring

“There is now a widespread consensus among the movers and shakers of the IT industry that SaaS is an important and meaningful issue which can no longer be regarded as the ‘lunatic fringe’.”

Gartner also put out some numbers. They say

…the worldwide SaaS market reached $6.3 billion in 2006 and is forecast to grow to $19.3 billion by year-end 2011

I have no insight into the composition of that figure. I often refer to the growth of companies with known numbers of registered users like Winweb with 128K users. A year ago? About 5K. The big question of course is just how many of those registered persons is a ‘real’ user.

Over the last year, I’ve fiddled with hundreds of services but only a small handful have stood the test of time. That means about 99% of what crosses my screen never gets used with any degree of seriousness. If those vendors are experiencing the same attrition rate that I’m applying then there will be a huge amount of fallout. That’s a good reason for checking out the maturity and background of the service providers you might wish to use.