Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) pioneer Salesforce.com (News - Alert) has received industry recognition for its innovations in the on-demand applications market. The company announced Monday that it was listed as a “top ten” vendor in Aberdeen (News - Alert) Group’s latest Annual State of the Market Report.

 

In the report, Aberdeen evaluated and ranked 100 organizations that, in its opinion, provided noteworthy value to the business community. To determine ranking of these companies, Aberdeen surveyed 5,000 business decision-makers.

 

Salesorce.com made the cut, positioned as number eight in the rankings. In doing so it joined Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM (News - Alert), Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Sun Microsystems at the top of the list.

 

On-demand SaaS (News - Alert) offerings have become a very popular concept in the past few years. Perhaps most-talked about of late has been Google Apps, a suite of desktop-like programs for word processing, spreadsheet and e-mail offerings from search engine giant Google. But, Salesforce.com can rightfully say it was at the early forefront of the SaaS trend. The company was founded in 1999 by Marc Benioff, a former Oracle executive, who saw great potential in the idea of delivering business applications online.

 

Today, Salesforce.com offers a variety of SaaS applications. Perhaps most well-known of these is its customer relationship management (CRM) solution. The company also offers a directory of on-demand applications through its AppExchange community, and a online developer platform, Force.com, that enables customers and partners to build new on-demand applications that can be shared, exchanged and installed easily.

 

Among Salesforce.com’s approximately 43,600 customers (as of April 30) are Dow Jones Newswires, Kaiser Permanente, SprintNextel and KONE. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CRM.

 

In its report, Aberdeen Group identified current trends regarding technology spending priorities among the executives it surveyed. Topping the list of concerns from respondents was total cost of ownership (43 percent). This was followed by product functionality (42 percent), vendor stability (24 percent), market-specific knowledge and experience (24 percent), domain or industry expertise (22 percent) and reputation (21 percent).

 

In other words, enterprise IT decision-makers look first at how much a particular product or service will cost, and then at how well it works, how well-established and knowledgeable the vendor is, how focused the vendor is on specific needs of the market it serves, and what others think of the solution and vendor. In terms of specific types of IT investments, Aberdeen reported that CRM, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) had the highest priority. This was true for both mid-size companies and large organizations.

 

In a Monday statement, Benioff (who is chairman and CEO at Salesforce.com) noted that a few years ago, his company’s motto, ‘The End of Software,’ was seen as a bold prediction. Now, it is an apt description of the market.

 

“Being named amongst this group of industry leaders is further evidence of the SaaS market's fast trajectory of growth,” he said.