The worldwide business intelligence (BI) tools market generated more than $4 billion in revenues in the second half of 2010 (2H10), according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Business Intelligence Tools Tracker. This marks the first time the market has surpassed the $4 billion mark in a semiannual period. For the full year 2010, the BI tools market grew 12.7% year over year, adding $893 million in global revenues over the previous year.

“2010 was a solid year for the BI tools market and our models indicate that growth will continue throughout the five-year forecast period,” said Dan Vesset, program vice president, Business Analytics. “Business analytics remains one of the top priorities for most organizations and BI tools are one of the key enabling technologies for more pervasive business analytics. To continue growing in the BI tools market, vendors need to align their technology packaging and pricing with the growing preference among end-users for departmental and incremental projects and subscription pricing. Although the latter still represents only a small portion of the BI tools market, SaaS or cloud BI offerings are growing three times faster than the rest of the market.”

The End-User Query, Reporting, and Analysis functional market enjoyed a stronger growth rate for the year, up 13.7% over 2009. Russia delivered an outstanding performance in this functional market, with annual growth of more than 200%. Australia, Canada, India, Korea, and PRC also had growth rates above the global average. In addition, Brazil and Russia broke through the $100 million revenue mark in 2010, joining eight other major countries with annual revenues over $100 million.

IDC, one of the leading industry analyst firms, just unveiled their new report "Worldwide Software as a Service 2010-2014 Forecast: Software Will Never Be the Same"

The report says that IDC research shows SaaS growing six times faster than on-premises software, forecasting compound growth of 26% per year through 2014. With Intacct planning 100% growth this year, I'd say we are right on top of this trend.

Robert Mahawold who authored this report is a good and smart guy - he's deeply rooted in both the traditional on-premises software and the new cloud computing world.

SMEs Voice Frustration over lack of integration between Salesforce CRM and Finance Apps

Even as IDC reports that Software-as-a-Service solutions may  soon overtake traditional packaged applications in total sales, integration between disparate elements continues to be a top concern among many users. In particular, the majority of recently surveyed Salesforce CRM users are fed up with the lack of integration provided by popular financial and accounting solutions, including QuickBooks and Sage.

Professionals from more than 200 small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in North America described the biggest challenges with their current accounting solution in the survey. Of those who used Quickbooks or Sage and Salesforce CRM, 67% cited lack of CRM integration as their biggest headache.

The survey was conducted by FinancialForce.com, developer of the only cloud accounting application built natively on the Force.com platform from Salesforce.com. Launched in 2009, Salesforce CRM customers including Telegraph Media Group, CyberSafe Limited and the Wi-Fi Alliance have deployed FinancialForce Accounting to replace their legacy accounting systems. FinancialForce Accounting shares Salesforce CRM’s simple design and interface and provides a highly sophisticated financial management solution that scales from the smallest to the most complex multinational organization.

Survey participants went one step further to provide color on how the lack of integration impacts their work and their companies, including:

In a new market projection, IDC confirms what many industry watchers have been thinking intuitively all along: that more and more software is being delivered as a service, or via the cloud.

A new IDC study shows that the Software as a Service (SaaS) market had worldwide revenues of $13.1 billion in 2009. IDC forecasts the market to reach $40.5 billion by 2014, representing a compound annual growth rate of 25.3%.

So what does this mean? It means increasingly large chunks of IT are being delivered in service mode, versus project-by-project, or application-by-application installed or built and maintained in the data center.

What portion of your revenue comes from SaaS offerings? How do you expect it to grow?

Globally, our SaaS business constitutes 5-10 percent of our revenue. We expect this to grow to 10-15 percent in the next couple of years. IDC has predicted a growth of 27 percent in the Security-as-a-Service (SaaS) market over the next five years, so we also expect similar growth in our SaaS revenue. The on-premise market is growing at roughly 10 percent. Thus, the SaaS market is growing three times faster than on-premise, offering opportunity for our partners and us.

How are you taking SaaS to the market? How do partners benefit from this offering?

A recent report released by Zinnov Consultancy states that cloud services in India will be worth $1 billion by 2015, while an IDC survey reveals that 87.5 percent of users surveyed cited security concerns as the primary issue in adopting cloud-based services. McAfee plans to leverage its comprehensive SaaS portfolio of cloud-based security services along with its global threat intelligence network to help make the broader cloud computing ecosystem more safe and secure. As in the case of our other products, we will be using channel routes to bring this product to the market, and will therefore look at adding a few channel partners in the near future. Partners will be entitled to similar margins and benefits from McAfee.