Despite the almost reflexive use of the word “cloud” in the computing industry, relatively little software was actually being used in that fashion as of year-end 2014, according to a new, comprehensive study from PwC, titled “PwC Global 100 Software Leaders.”
Among the world’s top ten software vendors by revenue, only one — Salesforce — was offering exclusively Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (Paas). The combined SaaS and PaaS offerings from other nine top vendors accounted for only single-digit percentages of their total software sales. For the largest three vendors — Microsoft, Oracle and IBM, in that order — that number was 4 percent.
The 2014 numbers are the latest available, though “I think the broad trends we identified are continuing today,” said Raman Chitkara, PwC’s global technology industry leader, in an interview today. PwC is the brand under which the member firms of PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited operate and provide professional services.
Other vendors with major SaaS or PaaS presence were Intuit (46 percent), Adobe (23 percent), Cisco Systems (35 percent), Citrix (27 percent) and Google (85 percent). No other company within the top 50 by revenue offered 100 percent SaaS or PaaS, though ADP offered 93 percent, just ahead of Google. The top 50 companies garnered an average of 12 percent of revenue from SaaS and PaaS.
More generally, the study showed that the world’s ten largest software firms by revenue generate 45 percent of worldwide software-sales revenues. Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, Symantec, EMC, VMWare, HP, Salesforce, and Intuit combined generated $171.7 billion of the total worldwide software revenue that PwC estimated at $385.3 billion. All but one of the top ten — SAP — is based in the U.S.
