Saugatuck Research recently announced the preliminary results of their most recent worldwide survey on SaaS adoption and deployment. While most of the findings are consistent with other surveys of SaaS adoption (ie continued aggressive midmarket adoption, and a rapidly awakening enterprise market), there were a couple of interesting findings of note:
- Among ‘large enterprises’ (5,000+ employees), only 4% are not planning on deploying SaaS, a radical departure from other market data we’ve seen from as recently as a year ago
- Midsized companies surveyed (100 to 499 employees) had a 95% customer satisfaction rate with their SaaS deployments – we can’t recall seeing a number that high for anything, let alone anything associated with software
The customer sat number, in conjunction with several other observations, begins to shed some light on the dynamics driving aggressive midmarket SaaS adoption. Namely the SaaS deployment patterns of midmarket companies, vs SMBs and enterprises, tend to be characterized by:
- Greater focus – the Saugatuck survey indicates that midsized organizations tend to be more focused and disciplined on where they deploy SaaS applications
- Fewer expectations – midsized companies like SaaS for the core value proposition – lower costs, faster implementation and lower management overhead, and look less then their SMB and enterprise brethren for focus on ‘core business competencies’
- Higher satisfaction – not surprisingly, greater focus + lower expectations = high mid-market satisfaction, leading to…
- Increased adoption – adoption rates that are continuing to outpace SMB and enterprise segments
An article discussing the highlights of the survey can be found here – Saugatuck also mentions that more detailed survey results will be made available this summer….
