SaaS Demand Won’t Let Up

Along with Gartner, IDC places SaaS at the top of the public cloud stack.

“SaaS applications remain the largest and most mature segment of public cloud, with 2021 revenues that have now reached $177 billion,” said Eric Newmark, group vice president and general manager of IDC’s SaaS, enterprise software and worldwide services division.

(Note that IDC’s number dovetails nicely with Gartner’s.)

“The tailwinds of the pandemic continued to fuel expedited upgrades and replacements of older systems in 2021, though company goals haven’t changed,” Newmark added.

For 2022, expect organizations to keep looking for applications “that will help increase enterprise intelligence, improve operational efficiency and drive better decision-making,” Newmark said.

Synergy Research’s analysts see a similar trajectory.

In late June, the firm said enterprise SaaS, along with managed private cloud services and content delivery networks, accounted for $54 billion in first-quarter 2022 services revenue. That figure rose by about 21% over 2021.

None of that comes as a shock, really.