Respondents are taking a cautious approach to SaaS as evidenced by the number of firms still learning about SaaS (35 percent) being virtually the same as those that are planning or implementing it (39 percent).
Further, the 26 percent who are not planning to use SaaS may indeed change their minds in the future.
A slightly higher percentage of small to midsized businesses (SMBs) than larger enterprises plan to use SaaS across the board. SaaS is planned to be used heavily to support the needs of highly distributed workforces. SMBs are more than twice as likely to use SaaS for their mission-critical applications. This supports the interest in vertical solutions and CRM shown earlier.
Figure 3: How important are the following attributes in selecting a SaaS provider?
The emphasis on financial returns continues, with price, TCO and vendor flexibility leading both "extremely important" and "very important" rankings. The large number of attributes with 90 percent or more rankings of at least "important" indicates that there are substantial "table stakes" in the SaaS market.
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