A new report from Gartner, “Market Trends: Software as a Service, Worldwide, 2008-2013, Update,” estimates that global software-as-a-service revenue will reach $7.5 billion this year, a 17.7 percent increase from 2008 revenue of $6.4 billion.

Gartner predicts the SaaS market will show consistent growth through 2013 when worldwide SaaS revenue will total more than $14 billion for the enterprise application markets.

Gartner is updating it's may report, where it had predicted that the global SaaS market would reach $8 billion in 2009, a 21.9 percent increase from 2008 revenue, which it had then pegged at $6.6 billion.

According to the report, the content, communications and collaboration (CCC) market and the customer relationship management (CRM) market had the largest share of SaaS revenue, with the CCC market generating $2.6 billion in 2009, up from $2.14 billion in 2008, and the CRM segment generating $2.3 billion in 2009, up from $1.9 billion in 2008.

The report revealed that CRM and ERP solutions make up the bulk of SaaS revenues – however, also contributing to the growth in the SaaS market are today’s SaaS-based call center solutions. A recent report from market research firm DMG Consulting arrives at similar findings and predicts that the SaaS-based call center software market will grow 30 percent in 2009, 35 percent in 2010 and 20 percent in 2011.

DMG’s findings reveal that the worldwide economic recession is actually driving many types of organizations in all verticals to consider hosted call center infrastructure solutions over expensive on-premises based systems.