Right Place, Right Time - 3 SaaS Segments, 14% Growth, $8.5 Billion

Smartsheet has been on a growth tear over the past 6 months. It’s been quite fun. Today, more good news. Gartner published their market projections for global software-as-a-service (SaaS) in three categories well served by Smartsheet. Project Management, Collaboration and CRM. More specifically, from the story by D.H. Kass:

“Global sales of software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the enterprise application segment will jump more than 14 percent to $8.5 billion this year when compared with the $7.5 billion generated in 2009, a spike attributed largely to the business community’s growing endorsement of cloud computing, according to data compiled by researcher Gartner Inc.”

“The researcher said that it expects worldwide SaaS sales in markets such as project and portfolio management (PPM), content, communications and collaboration (CCC), and customer relationship management (CRM) will grow steadily—albeit at varied rates--based on increasing customer demand and the suitability of certain applications.”

The Gartner research is specific to enterprise applications, but SMB markets have always run in lock step. Our paying customers today are split down the middle between small businesses and teams within enterprises. The teams using Smartsheet within each enterprise customer have been steadily mushrooming, and as such, we’re routinely adding more enterprise features.

Salesforce blazed a similar trail in its rise to dominance. They provided a ‘do it yourself’ sales solution for small businesses and teams within enterprises. As time went on, they expanded amongst teams within the enterprise, and followed that expansion by filling out their enterprise feature set.

We’re getting double digit growth in all three Gartner segments mentioned - customers that initially deploy Smartsheet for CRM, Project Management or Collaboration & Content Mgmt.

A good percentage of our customers begin using Smartsheet for one category and quickly expand to the others. Some of the Simple CRM market is coming to us from the very successful integration with Google Apps. We posted on the Saas, CRM and Google Apps perfect storm a while back. And, as we detailed in An App-Suite in a Sheet, the breadth of Smartsheet’s utility in a company is endless.

Usage by Sheet Count

Onward and upward.

- Brent