One of the benefits of being in the middle of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market is getting exposed to a variety of interesting resources and research projects.

For instance, at last week’s Software 2008 conference in Las Vegas I was able to attend the kickoff presentation by Abhijit Dubey of McKinsey & Company which summarized the firm’s latest SaaS research regarding the evolution of on-demand platforms. Dubey and McKinsey have produced a series of research reports which have verified THINKstrategies’ SaaS survey studies regarding the accelerated adoption of SaaS. Even more importantly, their research clearly shows the total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) advantages of SaaS for enterprise customers and on-demand platforms for software vendors.

THINKstrategies’ SaaS Showplace has also attracted plenty of attention as a resource for a variety of other research initiatives. For instance, THINKstrategies is supporting a financial benchmark study of the SaaS industry being conducted by OPEXEngine. OPEXEngine’s benchmarking survey is aimed at B2B software companies with 2007 revenues between $10M-$250 million offering SaaS solutions. Participants in this study will receive a confidential Company Performance Report and a detailed Industry Report that will cover key financial performance metrics. Click here for more information. Tell them THINKstrategies and Jeff Kaplan referred you.

THINKstrategies is also happy to support the research efforts of Professor Stéphane Gagnon of the Department of Sciences Administratives at the Université du Québec en Outaouais in Gatineau, Québec, Canada. The purpose of his study is to identify factors explaining the relative success of software components commercialized as XML Web Services, a sub-category of the SaaS market. This survey contains 11 questions with 60 data items. All the survey participants’ responses will remain confidential, and all data gathered will be published strictly in aggregate formats. The survey questions are available at http://www.gagnontech.com/saas.

And kudos to Peter Laird, an Architect at BEA/Oracle, who converted the contents of THINKstrategies’ SaaS Showplace into a terrific visual map of the rapidly changing industry landscape. I highly encourage you to visit his blog and give him feedback regarding his visualization of the SaaS marketplace.

Contact me if you’re conducting or have found interesting research or analysis of the SaaS (or managed services ) market.