PAC’s report ‘Business Applications & SaaS in the UK SME Sector – Identifying Hot-Spots and Mapping the Vendor Landscape’, is the latest in a new UK local research programme. The report analyses the positioning of key application vendors in the SME space in the UK, and provides an overview of how various application vendors are direction their strategies to tackle to move towards SaaS.

The key findings of this report are:
UK SMEs will spend more than £1.6bn on business applications and SaaS in 2012 – i.e. 43% of the UK spend.

Cloud-based services to access enterprise-class functionality on affordable and flexible commercial terms are becoming the norm; PAC expects the SME SaaS market to more than double in size by 2015 to well over £500m.

Solid growth rates combined with a highly fragmented supplier landscape in the lower/core mid-market mean that significant business opportunities remain up for grabs.

However, of the top 20 applications vendors servicing the UK SME sector, PAC rates only two as having mature SaaS offerings. The SaaS model is still very much a work in progress for many ISVs.

The report also includes data on the current and future scale of application software and SaaS spending in the SME market, as well as a detailed breakdown of the supplier landscape by company size.