SANTA CRUZ, USA: According to the latest Evans Data Global Development Survey, over half of all developers (51.9 percent averaged over all regions) expect to work on programs delivered in the Software as a Service model during the next 12 months. 

Adoption expectation is strongest in the Asia-Pacific region, although the number of developers currently working on SaaS implementations is highest in North America, where 30 percent say this is part of their current development efforts.  In the EMEA region, fewer developers are currently developing SaaS but 53 percent expect to be doing so within 12 months.

“These SaaS results definitely reaffirm the success of this concept in replacing the traditional model of business applications being run in house with traditional software licenses” stated John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data. “SaaS is delivering on the promise of rapid deployment, limited upfront investment in capital and staffing, plus a reduction in the software management responsibility all making SaaS a very desirable alternative to software on a user’s premise."

Cloud computing has less traction than SaaS, with less than 10 percent of developers using cloud services, but over a quarter have plans to use cloud services at some point, and in the Asia-Pacific region the number expecting to is almost half.

Other highlights from the survey include:

* In the Asia-Pacific region over two-thirds of all developers (68 percent) spend some portion of their time writing Rich Internet Applications, though only two percent do this exclusively

* In North America, 37 percent say their work currently involved some type of virtualization

* In EMEA, more developers use VMware tools for virtualization, although Microsoft tools are close and both are far ahead of all other brands in usage

* Across all regions the primary obstacle to cloud computing is security.

The Global Development Survey was conducted in Fall 2008 worldwide in six different languages and consists of over 1300 in-depth interviews with developers in the major global regions.