Touting solutions that save money on installation and service costs, a France-based document process automation provider today announced that it saw 66 percent revenue growth last year on its Software-as-a-Service products.

 

Generally speaking, SaaS (News - Alert) is a model of software deployment where an application is hosted as a service provided to customers across the Internet. By getting rid of the need to install and run an application on the customer's own computer, SaaS reduces the cost of software maintenance, operation and support.

 

Officials at Esker, which has its U.S. headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin, SaaS represented $9.25 million in sales revenue for the company, representing 26 percent of its total revenues.

 

According to Jean-Michel Bérard, the company’s chief executive officer, Esker’s (News - Alert) growth bolsters its position as a leader in on demand document automation solutions and SaaS.

 

“The SaaS model has been at the heart of our strategy for several years following the success of Salesforce.com (News - Alert), and our goal is to achieve, by 2010, more than 50 percent of our sales revenue via our on demand offerings,” he said.

 

Citing a report from Gartner Inc., Esker says the SaaS market is expected to double by 2012 from $6.4 billion last year.

 

And, analysts say, it isn’t just IT businesses that should be looking into software-based technologies.

 

As TMCnet reported, one new study says that the U.S. government could save billions by moving to more open source software, virtualization and cloud computing.

 

The 14-slide study – from MeriTalk, online group that studies public policy and IT, as well as Red Hat and DLT Solutions Inc. – says that after years of boosted funding, federal IT managers are facing a new challenge: the budget crunch.

 

“With a grave economic outlook and a new administration in office, Federal agencies will be forced to do more with less,” the study says. “Across 30 key Federal agencies, the government allocated $60 billion for IT infrastructure in FY07, FY08, and FY09. Instead of worrying over a budget stop, why not make the most of the money we are already investing?”

 

According to the study, open source software, virtualization and cloud computing will help do just that.

 

Specifically, MeriTalk’s study says that cloud computing, or software-as-a-service, could bring $6.6 billion, which includes $551 million from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, $387 million in savings from the U.S. Department of Energy and $279 million in savings from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

 

Officials at Esker say that with their so-called “Esker on Demand” and “FlyDoc (News - Alert)” services, customers only pay for what they use and there is no need to invest in infrastructure, such as fax machines, printers, copiers, metering machines and folding machines, or the labor, consumables and maintenance to keep that infrastructure running.

 

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