Microsoft Is ‘Rapidly Growing’ Its Enterprise SaaS Revenue

Microsoft is becoming an increasingly competitive strength in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market, growing its market share by almost three percent in 2015.

However, the Azure cloud provider still has a long way to go before catching up with leader Salesforce, according to Synergy Research Group.

Still, Microsoft is growing its SaaS revenues quicker than Salesforce, said Synergy.

Mature

“In many ways SaaS is a more mature market than other cloud markets like IaaS or PaaS,” said John Dinsdale, a research director at Synergy Research Group.

“However, even for SaaS it is still early days in terms of market adoption. It is notable that the big three traditional software vendors – Microsoft, Oracle and IBM – are all now growing their SaaS revenues faster than the overall market and yet SaaS accounts for less than 8 percent of their total software revenues.”

In total, the SaaS market grew by almost 40 percent in 2015, according to the Nevada-based analysts. The market is set to triple in size by 2021, with SAP, Adobe, IBM, and Workday all hitting growth rates in excess of 50 percent in 2015.

Microsoft’s SaaS products include Exchange Online, Sharepoint, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Last year, Gartner said that the worldwide CRM market grew 13.3 percent in 2014, with Salesforce leading with 18.4 percent of the global market share. Microsoft staked a 6.2 percent share of the CRM market, behind Oracle and SAP, but ahead of IBM.

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