It’s nice to attend a conference where you don’t have to explain what SaaS means or go into your pitch about the benefits of a SaaS model.  I am at the SaaS Summit in San Francisco coordinated by OpSource (www.opsource.net) which appears to be the largest gathering of SaaS providers to date.   A well organized event with representation from organizations including Salesforce.com, Omniture, Microsoft, Clickability, Vtrenz, MySQL, Oracle, and many more.

In a keynote address by Greg Urquhart, GM at Microsoft, he explained a term that Microsoft uses, S+S.  Not SaaS, ASP, Managed Service, On-Demand, or Hosted, but S+S, which means “software plus services.”  Greg explained the reasoning for the term; SaaS is the delivery aspect of a larger value.  Greg’s delivery was a good overview of how Microsoft is positioned to embrace SaaS.

Omniture’s CEO Josh James followed with the success story of his web analytics company.  Josh walked through some financials and sales/marketing approaches that Omniture used to establish market dominance.  One of which is QBSR’s – quarterly bearing sales representatives – with a high-powered service team in place to meet the customer demand after the sale.

The forecasts, research, trends, case studies, and success stories all point to a significant rise in SaaS popularity.  Speakers cited IDC data forecasting a 32% CAGR over the next 5 years, which amounts to the SaaS market growing by $11.2 billion.  William McNee with Saugatuck Research contributed statistics by communicating that 70% of business will have deployed at least 1 SaaS application by 2012. 

William also talked about customer satisfaction with SaaS providers is greater than that of installed software citing 84% of customers who deployed a SaaS application are satisfied.  In my opinion, the reason for this is because SaaS providers do not go away after the initial sale – which is when all the heavy lifting starts – implementation, training, and service & support.   Customers need to have a hand-holding experience. 

As the sole representative of the digital asset management industry, I was on an education mission.  It was clear that not everyone in this audience knew the term but everyone, as usual, liked saying the acronym over and over again (at least I could leave out the SaaS pitch).  In most of these cases, DAM fits as a component within these larger offerings acting as an enabler to other applications.