Research and Markets: Asia Pacific Business Applications as a Service Market 2010

March 20, 2011 10:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/3bcef3/asia_pacific_busin) has announced the addition of Frost & Sullivan's new report "Asia Pacific Business Applications as a Service Market 2010" to their offering.

Business Applications as a Service is the delivery of Business Applications in a web-enabled pay as you go model. The market is witnessing increasing traction as the delivery model offers lower total cost of ownership and is fast to implement. The research study covers the Asia Pacific Business Applications as a Service market, examining drivers and restraints for growth, exploring trends that are impacting the market and the key market participants in each of the countries being covered. Forecasts and market sizing is included in this study with the base year is 2010 with forecasts running through 2017. For each market, emerging trends have been identified.

This research service titled Asia Pacific Business Applications as a Service Market 2010 provides an overview of the market scenario as well as the factors that are aiding or deterring the growth in this market. In this research, Frost & Sullivan's expert analysts thoroughly examine the following markets: customer research management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), human resources management (HRM), supply chain management (SCM), and business intelligence (BI).

Market Overview

Low-cost Factor Revs up Demand in the Asia Pacific Business Applications as a Service Market

The Asia Pacific business applications as a service (BAaaS) market is picking up strong traction as enterprises grow increasingly aware of the model's attractive low-cost value proposition. The economic slowdown has been driving the adoption of BAaaS as customers looking for cost savings moved from expensive on-premise deployments to the affordable software as a service (SaaS) model. With cost cutting being foremost on the agenda of CXOs, the easily predictable operational expenditure (OpEx)-based SaaS model hugely appealed to the senior IT decision makers. The positive buzz surrounding SaaS is driving enterprises to try out the delivery model by implementing it for CRM, HRM and office automation applications, notes the analyst of this research service. Having experienced rapid deployment cycle and flexibility at a low cost, enterprises are expanding the number of applications being used from the cloud.

Despite the significant advantages over on-premise systems, widespread uptake of SaaS is being hampered by enterprises' concerns around security and privacy. Enterprises are skeptical about handing over control of their confidential/critical data to third-party service providers due to lack of clarity of access, storage, and archival policies of the service providers. These concerns are limiting BAaaS penetration to non-core applications as enterprises lack confidence to migrate their core applications such as ERP and SCM into the cloud. Besides migration, integration challenges are also restraining market momentum.

To counter the skepticism, service providers are spreading awareness on the many benefits of choosing the solution and driving innovations in security and pricing models. They are highlighting the strength of the security measures in place and their effectiveness vis-a-vis on premise systems secured by firewalls and antivirus systems. Service providers are also offering the private or hybrid cloud option, depending on clients' data storage and security requirements. Over the medium term (3-4 years), significant innovations are expected to further augment the security of SaaS-based applications. It is imperative for service providers to raise confidence by following a highly transparent framework to cloud computing, says the analyst. This includes adherence to industry best practices such as ISO 27001 and SAS 70 framework to build trust among customers. The service level agreements (SLAs) must be clearly specified and move beyond availability issues to include factors such as disaster recovery and incident handling. Regular assessment by third parties will help instill customer and enterprise trust.

Market Sectors

Expert Frost & Sullivan analysts thoroughly examine the following market sectors in this research: