Gartner’s findings go on to predict the global enterprise applications software market will reach US$8.8bn in 2010.

SaaS will have a role in the future of IT, but not the dominant future that was first thought. Companies should carefully assess their software needs in light of the current promises delivered on by SaaS.

From a market perspective, most of the spending for SaaS is occurring in content, collaboration and communication and the customer relationship management markets. Collectively, they represented 65% of the global enterprise applications software market in 2009.

SaaS may not have delivered on its early grand promises - of the current SaaS deployments we estimate that a total of 90% of SaaS deployments are not pay-per-use, but it has re-energised the software market and added choice.