According to Gartner, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 18.4% in 2021 to total $304.9 billion, up from $257.5 billion in 2020, with software as a service (SaaS) remaining the largest market segment and is forecast to grow to $117.7 billion in 2021.
SaaS adoption is rampant with about 85% of small to midsize enterprises investing in SaaS Solutions today. With that adoption we typically see a lot of Shadow IT and duplicate applications (typically 4 duplicate subscriptions for every one that is approved). We also see that most small and mid-sized enterprise are churning about 30% of their SaaS products on a yearly basis, which basically means a need for onboarding, off-boarding, license management, security and cost controls.
By 2026, 50% of organizations using multiple SaaS applications will centralize management and usage metrics of these apps using an SMP (SaaS management platform) tool, an increase from less than 20% in 2021.
Gartner recommends:
- “Increase visibility into SaaS usage, improve manageability and automate repetitive SaaS Administration tasks, while improving consistency of securing identities and data across SaaS applications by adopting an SMP.
- Achieve the greatest efficiency benefits for IT by choosing the SMP that can support the majority of SaaS apps in use and that offers the greatest number of integration points in the functional pillars of greatest importance.
- Drive continuous improvement by leveraging the SMP to monitor and optimize SaaS license entitlements based on consumption and drive adoption of SaaS apps, and measure the performance of SaaS apps and integrated components.”
