The success of SaaS is driving broad change across the software industry. Today, customers are more aware of what SaaS has to offer, more comfortable with the reliability of SaaS solutions and keener to explore SaaS solutions for their businesses. Most SMBs and a growing proportion of enterprises use at least one SaaS application today. Software vendors, both large and small, are thinking about how to adapt to the new paradigms of the SaaS market, while a large number of developers across the world are moving to SaaS application development. The increase in SaaS application consumption and development is driving the need for a new set of platform technologies built specifically to support SaaS. In this article we address some of the key questions surrounding this development, including how to define these platforms, the forces shaping this emerging marketplace and the implications for various stakeholders.

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This year's survey of more than 850 enterprise software customers by McKinsey & Co in collaboration with the SandHill Group (www.sandhill.com) and the Software and Interop conferences showed increasing acceptance of subscription and on-demand models but more surprisingly, a high portion (74 percent) of enterprise customers favorably disposed to adopting SaaS platforms.

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