You’d think that after all the news of China blocking Google and other web sites Software-as-a-Service and cloud computing would be the worst software delivery model you would imagine?

Customer survey on SaaS Gartner conducted in November 2008 has shown that Asia/Pacific region is getting ahead of North America and Europe in SaaS adoption. Their respondents were evenly distributed across the globe with a third being in North America, third – in Europe, and third in Asia/Pacific (year, I know that there are other places on Earth too.) However, in terms of companies who have adopted SaaS about 50% of respondents turned out to be from Asia/Pacific.

Moreover, in this region more than 50% of respondents are in the process of replacing some on-premise systems with SaaS (in India this number is even higher – 70%).

Recent IDC report goes into some detail on the SaaS adoption in Asia/Pacific, and not only they also show significant growth in the market and the shift from on-premise systems, but specifically China turned out to the leader in SaaS adoption (more than 80% of respondents use or plan to use SaaS), and Australia to be a relative laggard (with slightly less that 50%).

My guess is that there are a few factors contributing to this higher SaaS growth in the region:

• Some countries such as India are currently investing a lot in the internet infrastructure, with many other such as Korea already the broadband a lot of us envy.
• In other countries, such as China, SaaS just makes more sense economically because it lets you collect money for your services more effectively than you can for packaged software. Packaged software sales are not that good in there due to high rates of piracy and so on. Subscription-based pay-as-you-go services might do better.

And yes, in some countries there will always be political risks, but these seem to be there in general and not really making SaaS business more risky than any other business there.

Would you agree with these conclusions? Thoughts/comments?

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adoption, Analysts, Asia/Pacific, Gartner, IDC, markets, SaaS
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