Techaisle’s SMB & Midmarket SaaS adoption trends study shows that 30% of SMBs are using less than 5 SaaS categories and 42% are using between 5-10 SaaS categories and balance 28% are using 11 or more SaaS categories. Firms with fewer than five SaaS applications in use mainly consist of relatively smaller businesses and includes a relatively high proportion of firms without internal IT management, and a relatively low number of internal staff members. It goes on to indicate that there’s no direct correlation between managed IT environments, number of IT staff and the number of SaaS applications in use.
However, data provides a basis for seeing SaaS application adoption as a function of IT budget. Working with these statistics, it appears that initial adopters provision one SaaS application category per every $45K-$60K in IT budget. Once these organizations gain experience with SaaS (deploying more than four SaaS application categories), the pace of adoption quickens: businesses report an additional SaaS application for each $40K-$50K in IT budget until they reach 10 installed application categories, at which point the pace of adoption increases again, with one new application added for each $30,000 or so in IT budget.