Sassy French

While UK companies are comfortably ahead of their German counterparts in adoption of software as a service (SaaS), both countries lag behind France according to a survey by Gartner.

71 percent of French respondents said that their organisation currently uses SaaS for enterprise applications, compared to 68 percent in the UK and 45 percent in Germany. Gartner also reckons more French workers actually use SaaS when it's made available to them.

"We believe that North American vendors have enjoyed greater success in the UK because less effort is required to localise products and sales and marketing strategies," said Chris Pang, principal research analyst at Gartner.

"However, other European countries are also willing adopters of SaaS applications and that international vendors not already active in the French and German markets should certainly investigate opportunities for growth here."

The most common use of SaaS is in customer relationship management (CRM) software, as popularised by SaaS pioneers like Salesforce.com. But Pang reckons enterprise resource planning (ERP), content communications and collaboration (CCC) supply chain management (SCM) may soon catch up.

"While there are many more vendors offering SaaS for applications other than CRM, their media exposure has generally been less conspicuous," said Pang. "Nevertheless, the penetration and use of ERP, CCC and SCM applications should not be underestimated. Many businesses already use some of these applications within a part of their organisation, and vendors looking to sell SaaS applications should find that most businesses are now more open to using SaaS than they were five years ago."

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