October 13th, 2005
Top 25 on-demand providers
Updated 10/20/05: Research company IDC last month published its first-ever list of the top 25 on-demand providers, based on 2004 revenues. It’s an interesting mix of the familiar, the unexpected and the obscure, although skewed by the omission of some potentially significant names. The report is called Worldwide Software on Demand 2004 Vendor Analysis: Top 25 On-Demand Providers Take Shape, by Erin Traudt and Amy Konary.
[Editor's note: At IDC's request, the list has been removed from this blog post. The full report is available from IDC.]
The established players like WebEx, salesforce.com, RightNow Technologies and Microsoft (Live Meeting) obviously lead the on demand pack, and IDC finds another 21 that are generating real revenue. I can’t help wondering what the list would look like if it included companies like Google, Amazon.com and eBay. It is of course tricky to separate out the business market component of their on-demand revenues, but if anyone tries to tell me AdWords and AdSense aren’t business applications for a lot of companies, then they have a very different understanding of the word ‘business’ than I.
Phil Wainewright is a commentator and strategist on emerging software industry trends. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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