Line of Business Execs Frequently Buy SaaS Services in Enterprise

A Forrester Research survey of 1,000 firms in North America and Europe recently found that 23 percent of firms use software as a service, with 11 percent of these respondents indicating that they are expanding usage. An additional eight percent planned to implement SaaS within a year’s time frame.

The greatest SaaS usage is in horizontal business process areas, such as customer relationship management or human relations, says Liz Herbert, Forrester Research analyst. But sales automation, customer support, recruiting and performance management in the cloud also are being used in a SaaS mode.