Microsoft Leads in SaaS Market; Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle and SAP Follow

RENO, NV, August 31, 2017

New Q2 data from Synergy Research Group shows that the enterprise SaaS market grew 31% year on year to reach almost $15 billion in quarterly revenues, with collaboration being the highest growth segment. Microsoft remains the clear leader in overall enterprise SaaS revenues, having overtaken long-time market leader Salesforce a year ago. Microsoft was already rapidly growing its SaaS revenues, but in Q2 its acquisition of LinkedIn gave its SaaS business a further boost. In terms of overall SaaS market rankings, Microsoft and Salesforce are followed by Adobe, Oracle and SAP, with other leading companies including ADP, IBM, Workday, Intuit, Cisco, Google and ServiceNow. It’s notable that the market remains quite fragmented, with different vendors leading each of the main market segments. Among the major SaaS vendors those with the highest overall growth rates are Oracle, Microsoft and Google. In many ways the enterprise SaaS market is now mature. However, spending on SaaS remains relatively small compared to on-premise software, meaning that SaaS growth will remain buoyant for many years. Synergy forecasts that the SaaS market will double in size over the next three years, with strong growth across all segments and all geographic regions.

“IaaS and PaaS markets tend to get more attention and are indeed growing more rapidly, but the SaaS market is substantially bigger and will remains so for many years,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “Traditional enterprise software vendors like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and IBM still have a huge base of on-premise software customers and they are all now pushing to aggressively convert those customers to a SaaS-based consumption model. At the same time, born-in-the-cloud software vendors like Workday, Zendesk and ServiceNow continue to light a fire under the market and help to propel enterprise spending on SaaS.”