According to IT research firm AMI’s latest worldwide SMB Cloud Services Practice, there are roughly 750,000 (12 percent) small businesses and 20,000 (24 percent) medium businesses already using software as a service (SaaS). In addition, the survey found by looking at today’s SaaS users, 78 percent of SBs and 31 percent of MBs are leveraging a SaaS plus on-premise mix (or hybrid model), while approximately only a third of SaaS users are using an actual pure-SaaS product.

With an anticipated growth of up to $95 billion in global SMB cloud-related spending by 2014, the firm said it isn’t a surprise to see over half of US SMBs looking into SaaS as a potential solution. Approximately one in five US SMBs plan to use SaaS. However, AMI said it believes that SMBs are easing into the concept of local plus cloud-based computing rather than leapfrogging into a pure-play platform.

via SaaS Increasingly Popular Among Small Businesses, Survey Finds – Midmarket from eWeek.