SAAS Providers Dispute Forrester Report

SAAS providers have said they have yet to see any downturn in the market, despite a Forrester report released recently that stated the market for software as a service would slow down this year.

The Forrester report said that while early adopters flocked to the new delivery method in 2007, other end-user companies grew more skeptical about it, citing concerns about total cost of ownership, integration, security and application performance.

Click here to find out exactly what the Forrester Report said would cause the slowdown.

However, Eric Berridge, a founder of Bluewolf , said his company has seen the opposite. Bluewolf is a Salesforce.com partner, conducting management consultancy and services around the software. Bluewolf also works with Google, IBM and Oracle providing on-demand software. “We have not seen any slowdown,” Berridge told Channel Insider. He said that with new phenomena such as SAAS, there is always an “ebb and flow to them.”

He said that although there are early adopters, so far they have been big, well-recognized global companies, and traditionally where these companies have adopted a technology their competitors have followed. “Given that these types of global enterprises and well-known brands are adopting this technology, I would be very surprised if there was any slowdown,” he said.

In fact Berridge said that the growth in his firm has meant the company recently opened two additional Authorized Training Centers in Boston and Philadelphia. Bluewolf staffs these centers with Salesforce.com Authorized Instructors to deliver Salesforce.com public training courses offered to Salesforce.com customers, partners and developers. The company opened its first center in New York City in 2007.

“SAAS has really grown over the past few years. We started working with Salesforce in 2001 [and] have seen good growth; we have grown consistently between 30 and 60 percent year on year,” Berridge said.

Jerry Jalaba, vice president of channel sales at SAAS provider Intacct, agreed, saying his company has also seen year-over-year growth in the SAAS market. Innact provides accounting software through the channel in a SAAS method.

“I have a different perspective to the Forrester report,” he said. “I think SAAS will be the way all software is delivered over time.” He said the biggest challenge for SAAS providers such as Intacct  is how to utilize the channel. Jalaba said he expects to see 100 percent growth in Intacct’s customer base year over year.