UK and France beating Germany on Software as a Service applications

Its study reveals that CRM (customer relationship management) is the most popular SaaS application in all three countries – and that the difference in adoption levels will shrink, if users follow through on their stated plans for general SaaS adoption in 2009. Contrary to the traditional assumption that the UK is most advanced in terms of SaaS adoption, fully 71% of French respondents said their organisations currently use SaaS for enterprise applications, compared to 68% in the UK, and just 45% in Germany. The survey findings also indicate a slight lead for France in the length of time that SaaS applications have been in use across the three countries. Only 4% of French respondents said that they had used SaaS for less than a year, compared with 17% in the UK and 21% in Germany. "We believe that North American vendors have enjoyed greater success in the UK because less effort is required to localise products and sales and marketing strategies," comments Chris Pang, principal research analyst at Gartner. "However, other European countries are also willing adopters of SaaS applications – and international vendors not already active in the French and German markets should certainly investigate opportunities for growth here." Beyond CRM, Gartner says that other SaaS applications being adopted include ERP, content communications and collaboration (CCC) and supply chain management). Pang believes that CRM's popularity is a result of the media exposure of high-profile vendors such as salesforce.com. In addition, CRM SaaS applications tend to cover a wider range of functions in common processes, such as sales automation, marketing automation and customer service support. SaaS applications like ERP tend to focus on specific areas of business process support, such as expense management, talent management, recruitment, web conferencing and procurement, he explains. "While there are many more vendors offering SaaS for applications other than CRM, their media exposure has generally been less conspicuous," says Pang. "Nevertheless, the penetration and use of ERP, CCC and SCM applications should not be underestimated. Many businesses already use some of these applications within a part of their organisation."