(Reuters) -With sales of web-based business software soaring, companies that focus on cloud computing are slipping into a sweet spot as technology giants look to bolster their presence in this fast-growing segment.

Cloud computing, or software as a service, allows businesses to cut back on hardware and space by having their software hosted in remote datacenters they access over the Web.

Deep-pocketed technology firms like IBM (IBM.N) or Oracle Corp (ORCL.O) might be looking to snag deals in this area to complement their own traditional, mostly on-premise services.

Human resource management software makers SuccessFactors Inc (SFSF.O) and Taleo Corp (TLEO.O) and retail-focused software firm DemandTec Inc (DMAN.O) could be the early targets, according to analysts.

“The themes of cloud computing and software as service (SaaS) are so real, and it’s still so early, that I think there should be lot of activity,” said Raymond James analyst Terry Tillman.

Janney Montgomery Scott analyst Sasa Zorovic believes companies like NetSuite Inc (N.N), Rightnow Inc (RNOW.O), Kenexa Corp (KNXA.O) and Constant Contact (CTCT.O) could all be attractive takeover targets.

Most big players delayed entering the cloud space and now want the scalable platforms provided by these SaaS companies to build efficient applications.

“With the growth of software as a service, companies have an increasing need to integrate data and business processes across on-premise and cloud systems,” IBM said in a recent statement.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software provider Salesforce.com Inc (CRM.N), which helped pioneer software as a service and is one of the fastest-growing software stocks, might also be considered as a takeout target. However, its size and rich valuation might not make for an easily digestible deal.

Since these companies deliver their software products over the Internet, it saves clients the cost of buying licenses in advance and running programs on their own computers.

The adoption of software as a service is expected to far outpace market growth through 2013, a Gartner report shows.

Currently, Salesforce.com accounts for about half of overall web-based CRM software sales, according to the report.

NICHE SELLS

However, firms with niche products like SuccessFactors and Taleo are also seeing explosive growth, as smaller companies queue up to vie for a share of the pie.

“SuccessFactors is adding a lot of potential total addressable market to the mix with all the stuff they are getting into,” said Tillman.

The company, which makes software that helps firms manage staff performance, posted a 37 percent jump in 2009 revenue. Revenue for 2010 is expected to grow 18 percent to 19 percent.

The company trades at a whopping multiple of 1,138 times forward earnings — 25 times the sector average. Its shares have risen more than two and a half times in the last one year.

In contrast, Oracle trades at 14 times forward earnings and SAP at 17.

DemanTec, another possible target, provides pricing and merchandise optimization for retailers. Its largest customer is Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT.N).

“For DemandTec, it was initially about fitting large global retailers like Target Corp (TGT.N) or Walmart to buy the best buy, but then they started selling software to their suppliers,” Tillman said.

The company’s products manage the same stores sales environment and help improve gross margins, he said, which could make it a valuable addition to large systems integrators that these retailers rely on, or even large enterprise companies.

Shares of the company have, however, dropped about 40 percent in the last one year.

RECENT CONSOLIDATION

The software sector has recently seen a flurry of activity with SAP AG’s (SAPG.DE) offer to buy Sybase Inc (SY.N) and IBM’s move to acquire AT&T Inc’s (T.N) business-to-business software unit.

Analysts believe these buyouts could accelerate the pace of consolidation in the tech industry in the next 12 months to 18 months.

“Just the fact that a large application vendor like SAP could become more aggressive increases the urgency of what other players like Oracle, IBM, Hewlett Packard Co (HPQ.N) or Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) feel about M&A,” said Tom Roderick, analyst at Thomas Weisel.

Roderick’s pick in the SaaS space is Salesforce.com, but he said the company did not look like an immediate target.

“It is the property that has the most strategic value. It is the market leader in SaaS by a long shot and CRM technology is certainly one, if not the hottest, application sectors in the marketplace right now,” he said.

The company’s revenue grew 21 percent in fiscal 2010, compared with fiscal 2009 and is expected to grow 18 percent to 19 percent in fiscal 2011 to between $1.55 billion and $1.56 billion.

The company trades at 75 times forward earnings and its shares have more than doubled in value in the last 12 months.

Web-based CRM provides a simpler, faster and cost-effective Customer Relationship Management services for businesses. It is easier and much affordable solution for customer relationship for businesses with IT and budget constraints. CRM applications can run on a standard web browser. In this,  I present the Top 5 SaaS web-based CRM Services for your convenience.

1. NETSUITE
Netsuite offers a comprehensive CRM solution set with customization tools. What makes it as a comprehensive package is because Netsuite is an on demand service with all in one front and back office solution. One of its unique features is the real time analytics dashboard that provides easy to view role specific business information which is always up-to-date.

2. SALESFORCE.COM
Salesforce.com is known to be a market leader in CRM. It combines the best of business processes and technology that provides powerful CRM services. Salesforce.com offers an array of CRM and business application services that allowa customers and subscribers to systematically record and store business data.

3. APLICOR
Aplicor delivers web-based CRM, ERP and accounting software to global midmarket and enterprise organizations. Its online CRM software and financial accounting solutions provide unique advantages in the areas of ease of use, business process automation, information analysis, software customization, and the complete delivery of enterprise-wide business systems.

4. SAGE
SageCRM.com offers CRM solution to enhance the power and convenience of web for marketing, sales, and customer care tools needed for marketing and selling industry leading service. Its software also provides tools for managing and analyzing all the current and historical data and activities.

5. MICROSOFT DYNAMICS CRM
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services is Microsoft’s online CRM that offers different plans for professional, advanced and enterprise level businesses. The web-based service gives more enhancement in customer service capabilities. It can automate workflow and provide analytics that helps to fillip the productivity of business.

SEATTLE — Most small-business owners don’t realize this yet, but a mother lode of technology that can free precious cash and manpower is available to them as in no other time in history.

Small firms typically buy basic clerical and accounting software in shrink-wrap boxes and run them on a company computer. The owner, or a harried employee, invariably gets pressed into service as resident tech expert.

But today, they can tap into a swelling portfolio of business applications residing in far-off computer servers. These programs come down from the Internet cloud, sent by a growing army of software companies eager to deliver powerful tools to Web browsers in laptops, netbooks and smartphones. Users pay as they use.

So-called software-as-a-service, or SaaS, has long been available to big companies. Now that computing power has become dirt cheap and Internet usage ubiquitous, software developers are racing to put cutting-edge business apps into the hands of small firms in ways that could give a lift to the economic recovery.

“We’re entering an entirely new paradigm,” says Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, a San Francisco-based supplier of programs that manage customer relations. “It’s fantastic for small business, because software-as-a-service gives them a whole new level of capabilities.”

TECHNOLOGY LIVE: Q&A with Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff

Services such as Speakeasy, Concur Breeze and Avalara have cropped up to manage Internet phone systems, do expense and travel accounting, and handle complex sales-tax payments for small firms. For modest fees, these suppliers assume the burden of keeping programs updated, secure and readily accessible. “This technology allows you to do more with less,” says Bruce Chatterley, CEO of Speakeasy, a Seattle-based supplier of Internet phone systems. “Small business can now go toe-to-toe with big business.”

The trend has grabbed the attention of the tech giants. Microsoft and IBM have begun hustling to prepare a new generation of hosted services, tuned for small businesses and neatly tying into their legacy products. “Big Blue is definitely going small!” declares Sean Poulley, IBM’s vice president of cloud collaboration.

And Google recently has become hyper-focused on this emerging market. The search giant is stepping up efforts to position its Web-delivered e-mail and clerical applications as the hub of some of the hottest new tools crafted specifically to help small firms.

“There is big money in this,” says Christopher Vander Mey, senior product manager for Google’s business line of products. “We want to give business a choice, and we strongly believe many will choose us.”

Growth in spending on cloud services by U.S. companies with 100 or fewer employees is projected to grow from $2.4 billion this year to $4.1 billion in 2013, according to research firm IDC. But that could turn out to be conservative if awareness spreads. “We’re at an acceleration point,” says Benioff. “We’re seeing real innovation and real growth, and it’s all coming from cloud computing.”

Sleeping better

Testimonials from early adopters bear out the benefit claims made by SaaS proponents. Take Glen Smith, CEO of Commercial Retrofitters & Recyclers, an energy auditing and recycling company in Upper Marlboro, Md. Smith knows firsthand how hosted services can minimize disruptions, should a company computer get lost or stolen.

In early 2009, Smith moved all his customer and banking records into online systems supplied by Salesforce.com, FinancialForce.com and Intuit’s QuickBooks Online. That allowed him to shed the Windows PC server he kept on the premises to store this invaluable data.

One weekend last month, thieves broke in and stole eight desktop PCs used by his office staff, along with a truckload of recycled tech equipment. Smith was unruffled. “On Monday, we went out and bought new computers, plugged them in, and we were back up and running by noon,” he says. “We didn’t have to re-create anything.”

At Executive Envelope, a Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.-based manufacturer of brochures and placards, office manager Claudia Brake was in dire need of a more efficient, accurate way to keep track of continually morphing sales-tax rates and rules imposed by the half-dozen states where Executive Envelope sells its products. The company accountant simply could not keep up. Errors — and audits — resulted.

By turning that tedious, detailed task over to Avalara’s specialized systems, the company saves eight to 10 employee hours a week, or $36,000 annually. More important, its exposure to audits has been reduced, allowing Brake to sleep better. “It not only makes my life easier, it allows me to focus on more valuable areas of our business,” she says.

Similarly, New Age Industrial, a Norton, Kan., aluminum equipment maker, recently turned to Concur Breeze to handle its business expense reports. Employees attending a recent tradeshow used their laptops to access the Concur Breeze website and make entries to expense reports while on the road. Back in Norton, accounting controller Missy Amlong could instantly review those entries.

“We went from seeing expense detail once a month to seeing detail in nearly real time,” Amlong says. She now spends 30% to 40% less time processing expenses.

Blended services

At Google, the proliferation of such services played into the hands of the team behind Google Apps Premier Edition, the suite of Web-based e-mail, calendar and clerical programs the company sells to businesses for $50 a year per employee.

On March 9, the search giant rolled out Google Apps Marketplace. Businesses can choose from more than 90 hosted services that tie into Google Apps. To appear in the marketplace, software companies pay a $100 registration fee and agree to route access to their service through Google Apps. They also pay Google a 20% cut of any revenue generated through the marketplace. More than 1 million Google Apps users are now using services supplied by Google’s marketplace partners.

“The idea was simple,” says Matt Glotzbach, product management director for Google business software. “Every day, there was a new vendor offering unique services in the cloud. We wanted to give small business a centralized point where they could see offerings, read reviews and install the offerings.”

Tom Hippensteel, vice president of LiquidConcrete, a Seattle-based maker of coatings for concrete and steel structures, has come to rely on Google Apps and its marketplace partner, SmartSheet, a supplier of project management software. Hippensteel often collaborates on new coating formulas and customer contracts with multiple employees in the field. Members of a work group might be simultaneously working in one or both of the cloud programs using Apple Macs, Windows PCs or Apple iPhones.

“When we’re done, we can hit save, and everybody has the current version,” says Hippensteel. “That solves the problem of multiple versions of a file flying around in e-mail attachments.”

IBM is making a similar bet that small firms will gravitate to a mix of basic and specialized hosted services seamlessly blended by a tech giant doing the behind-the-scenes heavy lifting. This spring, it announced partnerships with UPS, Skype, Salesforce.com and Silanis, an e-signature authentication maker. Subscribers to LotusLive, IBM’s hosted e-mail and document-sharing service, can now ship packages, make phone calls, manage customer records and authenticate documents directly from LotusLive. IBM intends to add more partners.

“This cloud-delivery model allows IBM to serve a whole new class of customers that we’ve not been able to reach easily before,” says IBM’s Poulley. “Now more than ever, you’re going to see us adapting to the needs of small business.”

‘Save to Web’

Microsoft, meanwhile, is attempting to ease its small-business patrons into the Internet cloud. It plans to roll out Office 2010, the latest iteration of the world’s most widely used suite of clerical programs, sometime in June.

A small-business owner will be able to buy Office 2010 for $199 embedded in a new Windows PC, or $279 in a shrink-wrapped box. A key new function: When closing a Word document, Excel spreadsheet or PowerPoint slide presentation, the user will be able to navigate to “Save & Send,” then “Save to Web.”

The file will then sail off to SkyDrive, a free file-storage service residing on Microsoft’s cloud servers. SkyDrive is available to anyone who signs up for a free Windows Live or Hotmail account. Later, the user can access the SkyDrive file and work on it from any Web browser on any computing device.

To do this, you must log onto Windows Live and use Office Web Apps, a lightweight, browser-enabled version of Office that Microsoft is preparing to make free to everyone; it plans to roll out Office Web Apps at the same time as, or slightly before, Office 2010.

“They want to sell Office 2010, but they also want to respond to the fact that people want to do stuff online,” says Matt Rosoff, senior analyst at research firm Directions on Microsoft.

Unlike Google and IBM, Microsoft is not letting any partners tie their apps directly into its breadwinner product. But, in the brave new world of cloud computing, that hasn’t stopped Central Desktop, a Pasadena, Calif.-based start-up, from hosting a service that enables users of Office 2003 and Office 2007 to collaborate in the Internet cloud.

For $25 per month, per user, Central Desktop lets you save older Office files on its servers, where multiple users can simultaneously access the same file. There’s no need to pay for Office 2010, or make the switch to Google Apps, says Central’s co-founder and CEO Isaac Garcia.

“We know small business wants to consume product via software-as-a-service,” he says. “It’s affordable, flexible and you pay as you go, instead of paying a large up-front licensing fee.”

www.usatoday.com

Google has its head in a federal government cloud.

The search engine giant wants to shift federal agencies from traditional desktop and server-based computing to so-called cloud computing, which relies on the web and outsourced remote file servers to deliver email, send instant messages and share files. That ranges from software as a service and suites of applications — like Google Apps — to remote data storage.

Google hopes to win certification within weeks for its suite of products, a General Services Administration blessing of Google’s cloud computing security. That has huge implications: With its $75 billion IT budget — roughly 10 percent to 20 percent of all IT spending nationally — the federal government is the cumulonimbus of the cloud computing world.

The GSA’s stamp of approval could put Google ahead of competitors like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, all of which want to capture portions of the federal government cloud.

“The government is very, very attracted to this technology,” said David Mihalchik, business development manager on Google’s federal team. “It is a new, cheaper platform with new capabilities.”

What Google is selling is cost savings of up to 75 percent from agencies’ current IT outlay, Mihalchik said. Much of those savings comes from eliminating hardware upgrades and software relicensing.

Google’s price: $50 per user per year.

“Agencies now have an option available to them with much lower costs upfront,” Mihalchik said. “They’re not paying up front to run their own infrastructure.”

Winning that business isn’t easy, however, especially when facing heavy hitters like Microsoft, Amazon and Terremark, which hosts the Data.gov and USA.gov sites.

But Google may have an important advocate: federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, who was Washington, D.C.’s chief technology officer when the district opted to buy a Google Apps license.

Kundra’s push to move much of the federal information technology infrastructure from 1,100 data centers to cloud computing is part of a perfect storm that Google and other potential vendors look to ride.

“This is about good government. This is about cutting waste. This is about delivering better service,” Kundra said.

Yet, questions remain about the safety of cloud-covered data, especially as more sensitive information moves to the cloud.

Unidentified hackers tapped Google’s source code last year and reportedly came away with software that supports its system that allows a single sign-on password.

Greater security, however, translates into higher costs — and fewer savings.

Source: www.bizjournals.com

Microsoft executive touts new Office suite at SaaScon

Okay, so maybe Microsoft won’t have lines of people outside stores waiting to buy Office 2010 like Apple fanatics waited for the iPad last weekend, but I’m sure more than a few IT administrators have May 12 circled on their calendars when Microsoft’s flagship software suite for work goes on sale. The consumer versions go on sale in June.

Office 2010, the successor to Office 2007, came up Tuesday at the SaaScon 2010 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., where Tim O’Brien, Microsoft’s senior director of platform strategy, explained the improvements in the Office suite, but also explained how Office 2010 is enabled for the new environment in which software is delivered as a service rather than as an application that is installed on the customer’s servers in exchange for payment of a license fee.

In his presentation, as well as in an interview afterward with this reporter, O’Brien explained how he anticipates users in a typical company will likely access Office 2010 on a PC, through the Web, or on a mobile device and, even more likely, via all three.

Adoption of Office 2010 should follow the pattern set when the Microsoft Exchange server was introduced in 2000 with a feature called Outlook Web Access that enabled end users to access their Exchange server through a Web browser. Five years later, as interest grew in Ajax development, the language for writing apps in browsers, O’Brien inquired as to how Microsoft customers were accessing Exchange.

The answer was that two-thirds of users were accessing the server from both on-premise and via the Web, as well as a few who connected from mobile devices.

“It was kind of an aha moment for us that people don’t use one or the other, they use all three depending on the context that they’re in,” O’Brien told his SaaScon audience.

Office 2010 is built to serve those three use models, too, as well as provide tighter integration with collaboration tool SharePoint 2010, also coming out May 12.

“To talk about Office 2010 without talking about SharePoint 2010 you only get half the picture,” he said in the interview. The newest SharePoint features Business Connectivity Services software to better connect SharePoint with back-end systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI).

“The business connectivity services in ShardPoint are actually the enabler of what you do on the desktop and extract value out of the back end systems,” he said.

And by offering Office 2010 in a SaaS or cloud computing environment, Microsoft is recognizing the realities of the IT industry today, even if it means forsaking the licensed on-premise software revenue model that made the company what it is today.

“People want simplicity. [They] want to get out from under the infrastructure management, the overhead burden. We’re familiar with all the drivers there. So the opportunity for technology providers to take that pain off their hands is a revenue opportunity,” O’Brien said.

Admittedly, he said, software companies make greater profit margins on software licenses than services, but the software license only counts for about 10 to 12 percent of the total IT budgets for most customers. By instead offering software as a service, Microsoft is now competing for maybe 40 percent to as much as 60 percent of the IT budget, even if it is at lower margins.

O’Brien quoted his boss, CEO Steve Ballmer, who has said repeatedly that “margin percentages do not pay the bills; margin dollars pay the bills.” “The cloud gives us the ability to go after more margin dollars in a way that lowers the customers overall costs,” O’Brien said.

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Cloud Computing Congress Europe & Enterprise Social Media Europe announces speaker line up

The latest in enterprise 2.0 software, building a collaborative workplace, social software tools, employee engagement in collaborative workplaces to discussing the latest state of cloud computing, its benefits, technical and security challenges, how the applications can be build, controlled and managed in a cloud-based environment are key issues debated at the Cloud Computing Congress Europe (http://www.cloudcomputingcongress.com) & Enterprise Social Media Europe (http://www.enterprisesocialmedia.net ) on the 15/16 March, Olympia, London.

It is a conference designed for the CIO, CTO, Head of Internal Communications, Enterprise architect, Data Storage managers, Head of IT, Government IT decision makers and more, allowing businesses to learn about the latest in enterprise social media apps, and cloud computing deployments – their successes and failures, and how far the market has come so far.

You can join the Linkedin group on the event web site http://tinyurl.com/ydll8q2 to network with other attendees, or follow the latest event activity on the Cloud Computing Congress Twitter account – http://twitter.com/cloud_comp_news

The 2 days of conference will feature industry leading speakers, including:

• David Wilde, CIO, Westminster City Council
• Dominic Burch, Head of Corporate Comms and New Media, ASDA
• Paul James, CIO, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, MOD
• Anthony Frost, Head of Corporate Communications, Santander
• Evangelos Kotsovinos, Vice President, Morgan Stanley
• Kostas Tsatsaris, CTO and Director, Strategy and Architecture, HM Revenue and Customs
• Robert Johnson, Strategic Consultant, COI Strategic Consultancy
• Henri Reinbolt, CIO, Greenwich Council

The Cloud Computing Congress & Enterprise Social Media are just two of the conference streams at the Social Media World Forum event http://www.socialmedia-forum.com, a leading social media event that brings together all facets of industry connected to social media. The event features 4 conference streams: Social Media, Mobile Social Media, Enterprise Social Media and Social TV.

“In a market such as Cloud Computing & Enterprise building trust and relationships between leading technology providers and clients is key to moving the cloud debate forward” comments Ian Johnson, MD Six Degrees Events. “By integrating the Cloud Computing Congress with Enterprise Social Media (http://www.enterpriseseries.com ), we build a networking environment that not only focuses on application building and we 2.0 in the workplace, but how services can be managed in a cloud environment.”

The Cloud Computing Series (http://www.cloudcomputingseries.com ) will offer the Enterprise market the chance to come along to free exhibitions and meet the various people at the show, and interact with an event with 4 conference streams. One large connected exhibition is running alongside this conference, which will be open over the 15^th/16^th March 2010.

Future events are being held in New York in June, and Singapore in September.

Korea Leaps on Cloud Computing Bandwagon

The government will spend around 200 billion won (about $172 million) next year for a number of ambitious Web-based computing projects to help the technology industry create more demand for their nascent cloud services, officials said Tuesday.

Cloud computing, the latest buzzwords in the technology sector, describes a new era of Internet usage when information and software are delivered over the Web, rather than a desktop computer.

Most activities and data will be stored online and accessed from a wider range of devices, including computers and mobile Internet gadgets, and the changes will allow companies to deliver information technology (IT) power in more efficient and cost-effective ways, Seoul policymakers say.

The world’s major Internet and technology companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon, are aggressive in pushing their own version of cloud computing services.

The Korean technology community seems to have the fever too with companies like Samsung SDS and LG CNS eager to get out of the gate early.

Cloud computing solutions are also a critical part of the Korean government’s green tech initiatives that focus on low-power devices for personal computers, televisions, displays and servers. Getting particular attention are low-power mobile Internet devices, light-emitting diode (LED) backlighting technology, solid-state drives (SSDs), and electric and hybrid vehicles.

Source

Microsoft cuts BPOS price to squeeze Lotus

While most observers portray Microsoft’s sortie into online email and collaboration services as a titanic battle to keep Google off its productivity applications turf, the real target of this week’s price reductions is IBM’s Lotus unit. In a briefing earlier this week, Ron Markezich, corporate VP, Microsoft Online Services told me that most of his team’s customer wins are at the expense of the IBM division: “Seventy-five percent of our enterprise customers are coming from a non-Microsoft platform — predominantly [Lotus] Notes.”

The half-price reduction for hosted Exchange seats (from $10 to $5 per month) and a one-third cut in the cost of the full BPOS suite (from $15 to $10) is designed to keep those deals flowing through. IBM earlier this year introduced its own hosted LotusLive iNotes service at an aggressive $36 per user per year. Microsoft’s old pricing was at a level destined to give prospects pause for thought. At $60 per year, it’s close enough to raise fewer objections. The lower pricing will surely help, too, in those cases where Google’s $50-a-year service is the competition.

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The Growing Cloud 2009 – The Top 150 Players in Cloud Computing

The Top 150 Players in Cloud Computing
— A robust ecosystem of solutions providers is emerging around cloud computing.Here, SYS-CON’s Cloud Computing Journal expands its popular list of most active players in the fast-emerging Cloud Ecosystem, from the ‘mere’ 100 we identified back in January of this year, to half as many again – testimony, if any further were needed, to the fierce and continuing growth of the “Elastic IT” paradigm throughout the world of enterprise computing.

Microsoft Offers Free SaaS To Salesforce, Oracle Customers

The offer for six free months of Dynamics CRM Online came a day after Microsoft dropped prices for cloud versions of Exchange and SharePoint.

Microsoft, which has increased its focus on cloud computing in recent weeks, is now making a big push for its customer-relationship management software-as-a-service. Microsoft announced Tuesday that it’s offering six months of free service to customers that switch from Salesforce.com or Oracle CRM On Demand to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.

At the same time, Microsoft eliminated the two-tier pricing and feature structure of Dynamics CRM Online. When it introduced the SaaS in April 2008, it offered a base version with 5 GB of storage for $44 per user per month, and a more feature-rich version with 20 GB of storage for $59 a month. Now it just offers a single version, for $44 a month and 5 GB of storage, which includes 200 custom entities and 200 workflows.

By comparison, Salesforce.com offers a professional version of CRM for $65 a month, and an enterprise version (its most popular) for $125 a month. Oracle CRM On Demand starts at $70 a month.

CRM continues to be the strongest and most attractive area for SaaS. The worldwide market for CRM was up 12.5% to $9.15 billion in 2008, according to Gartner. SaaS versions of CRM amounted to 20% of that market, up from 15% in 2007.

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