According to an article on Rick Telberg’s CPA Trendlines, the outlook for SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) is very strong.

SMB investments in SaaS applications, excluding CRM and ERP as SaaS, will jump to a compound annual growth rate of 18 percent over the next five years, according to Access Markets International Partners Inc.

“SaaS solutions are particularly well suited to workers on the go since they’re easy to use offsite across diverse platforms,” says Neha Jalan, an associate at AMI-Partners.

The latest issue of Accounting Today also projects positive horizons for SaaS. In “Technology Accelerates Corporate Advantage,” Gary Boomer writes: “… the most significant development to impact firms over the next few years will be ‘cloud computing’ or Software-as-a-Service. SaaS will change all firms’ strategies and help small firms to compete. Large firms may be challenged by resistance to change or lack of IT leaders who are willing to give up control of their data centers and large number of technical personnel. Firms are already moving to a hosted environment in tax return preparation; OCR and tax file organization; document management; e-mail, calendars and workflow; and practice management.”