The Almost-Meteoric Rise of SaaS on Wall Street

Wall Street and Technology published a couple of days ago, an article about the use of SaaS for Wall Street firms, written by Penny Crosman.

The article comments the success of some companies, mainly Salesforce and Sungard, in the SaaS market, and also their challenges and obstacles.

The article also mentions that Financial services is the second-largest industry user of SaaS, after the technology sector, according to Gartner. But most of the current financial services SaaS deployments are CRM applications. "Wall Street and financial services firms are more and more looking at [SaaS] from the CRM side of the fence," says Rob DeSisto, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

The biggest obstacle to SaaS in large firms is integration with back-end data storage and legacy systems. According the article, Gartner's DeSisto agrees that integration is the primary hang-up for SaaS on Wall Street. Although SaaS offerings can integrate with other programs, he notes, they operate more efficiently when the data is in the SaaS provider's data center.

Despite the obstacles and challenges, the SaaS has been adopted in all kinds of business and is here to stay.