A new report predicts that over half of all developers will create software as a service model (SaaS) related programmes during the next 12 months.

According to Evans Data, the number of engineers currently working on SaaS implementations is highest in North America, where over 30 per cent of programmers confirmed that such solutions are part of their current development efforts. However, new adoption expectation is strongest in the Asia-Pacific region, where at least 53 per cent of developers are likely to create SaaS applications within a 12 month perdiod.

"These SaaS results definitely reaffirm the success of this concept in replacing the traditional model of business applications being run in house with traditional software licenses," explained John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data. "SaaS is delivering on the promise of rapid deployment, limited upfront investment in capital and staffing, plus a reduction in the software management responsibility all making SaaS a very desirable alternative to software on a user's premise," added Andrews.

Meanwhile, cloud computing development is slowly gaining in popularity, despite nagging concerns over critical security issues. Indeed, although less than 10 per cent of developers are currently involved with cloud services, over a quarter of North American programmers plan to utilise the service at some point in the near future.

It should also be noted that two-thirds of developers in Asia-Pacific spend at least some of their time writing Rich Internet Applications (RIA), while 37 per cent of North American programmers confirm that their work involves some type of of virtualization.

SaaS allows applications to be hosted as a service provided to customers across the Internet. The platform eliminates the need to install and run software on individual machines, thereby reducing local maintenance and related operating costs.  X