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According to the latest Evans Data Global Development Survey, over half of all developers expect to work on programs delivered in the software-as-a-service model during the next 12 months.
The Evans Data survey of more than 1,300 developers around the world showed that 51.9 percent of the developers surveyed said they expect to build SAAS software over the next year.
“These SAAS results definitely reaffirm the success of this concept in replacing the traditional model of business applications being run in house with traditional software licenses,” stated John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data. “SAAS is delivering on the promise of rapid deployment, limited upfront investment in capital and staffing, plus a reduction in the software management responsibility all making SAAS a very desirable alternative to software on a user’s premise.”
Evans Data said adoption expectation is strongest in the Asia-Pacific region, although the number of developers currently working on SAAS implementations is highest in North America, where 30 percent say SAAS is part of their current development efforts. In the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, fewer developers said they are currently developing SAAS, but 53 percent expect to be doing so within 12 months.
Meanwhile, according to the survey, cloud computing appears to have less traction than SAAS, with fewer than 10 percent of developers using cloud services, but more than a quarter have plans to use cloud services at some point, and in the Asia-Pacific region the number expecting to is almost half.
However, the Evans study indicated that across all regions the primary obstacle to cloud computing is security.
In addition, the Evans survey said that in the Asia-Pacific region more than two-thirds, or 68 percent, of all developers surveyed said they spend some portion of their time writing Rich Internet Applications, though only two percent do this exclusively.
Another issue raised in the survey is virtualization. In North America, 37 percent of the developers surveyed said their work currently involves some type of virtualization. And in the EMEA, more developers use VMware tools for virtualization, although Microsoft tools are close and both are far ahead of all other brands in usage, the Evans survey said.