SaaS Growth Driven by ERP & Collaboration; Microsoft now the Overall Leader

RENO, NV, September 1, 2016

New Q2 data from Synergy Research Group shows that the worldwide enterprise SaaS market grew 33% year on year to reach well over $11 billion in quarterly revenues. While not the largest segment, ERP grew the most rapidly achieving 49% growth, while the largest segment, collaboration, grew by 37%. Microsoft has now overtaken Salesforce to become the overall enterprise SaaS market leader, though the market remains somewhat fragmented with each major segment featuring a different leader. Microsoft is dominant in collaboration while Salesforce dominates the CRM segment. Other leading SaaS providers include SAP, Oracle, Adobe, ADP, IBM, Workday, Intuit and Cisco. Among the top ten companies Oracle achieved the highest growth rate followed by Microsoft. The enterprise SaaS market is somewhat mature compared to other cloud markets like IaaS and PaaS. Nonetheless, Synergy forecasts that it will more than triple in size over the next five years, with strong growth across all segments and all geographic regions. Meanwhile the consumer SaaS market is much smaller than the enterprise market and is not growing as strongly.  However, in this segment there is huge growth for Microsoft, which has more than doubled its revenues on a rolling annualized basis.

“In SaaS a big battle is playing out between the traditional broad-based software vendors and companies that are focused on a specific application area or industry sector, many of which are entirely cloud based,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “It might be tempting to assume that the latter camp are leading the charge, but in fact the traditional software vendors are growing their SaaS revenues more rapidly, helped by their huge base of on-premise software customers that can be aggressively targeted for conversion to a SaaS consumption model.”