Office 365 on the rise in the Belgian business market
56 percent of Dutch businesses use software in the Cloud. In companies with 50 to 250 employees, 69 percent of them use a SaaS solution. That means this sector leads the pack in SaaS usage for the Belgian business market. Computer Profile thinks this is the top Cloud user, with 65% in the manufacturing industry. By far the most branch-specific software for education is acquired in SaaS form. The lowest usage of the Cloud is found in the public domain. It’s interesting to know that in the Dutch business market, the penetration of the Cloud is the highest in the public domain. Here, 71% of the sites use the Cloud, whereas in Belgium only 41 percent of them do. This has emerged from 4,000 interviews about SaaS that Smart Profile had with IT managers from Belgian businesses.
The government continues to lag behind in terms of Cloud acceptance, with 30 percent SaaS usage. Segmentation according to size shows that the use of SaaS applications is the highest in companies with 100 to 200 employees (59%). Usage is less than 49 percent in companies with more than 500 employees.
HR and Office are the most popular cloud applications
HR software is the most frequently used SaaS application. More than 40 percent of businesses use HR software in the Cloud. Office applications are also very popular in the Cloud. Nearly one out of five company sites (19%) uses an Office application which is provided as SaaS.
Microsoft Office 365 constitutes by far the largest share of Office applications in the Cloud. More than one in five locations are now using an office application in the Cloud. Here, too, education is well ahead of the other sectors.
Cloud Providers
The rapid increase in the use of Office 365 can also be seen when you look at the the vendors of SaaS applications. When we look at the shares of the SaaS vendors, we can see that Microsoft is the leading SaaS vendor, with a market share of 36%. Apart from the use of Office 365, the use of Share Point Online is also a major share of the Microsoft Cloud use as well as Exchange Online and CRM Online. SAP scores well in ERP solutions; of all the solutions SAP is 45% and Microsoft 20%.
In view of the dominance of Microsoft for office applications and the increasing use of Office 365, the leading position of Microsoft as the most popular SaaS vendor is only going to increase in the next few years. Meanwhile, 17% of all Microsoft solutions is one of the Office 365 versions.
