There is an interesting commentary over at The Intelligent Enterprise Blog by David Linthicum, managing partner of Zapthink. This piece is about a recent Datamonitor survey of 300 pharmaceutical and biotech firms across Europe and North America about their attitudes toward software as a service (SaaS). The results showed that the end users of these applications overwhelmingly prefer the SaaS model over more traditional enterprise applications.

Why you may ask? End users cite better quality products, better customer support, and better service as the prime reasons, but David digs further into the real reasons why SaaS is better, including:

• Users are more accustomed to the web, and spend more time online then they do in their enterprise applications, making it a very familiar experience.
• Users expect to be able to access their applications from anywhere, home, work, and vacation, and to be productive whenever they want to.
• SaaS vendors are hungry for business and are ready to provide the stellar service necessary to win clients over and keep them. With SaaS vendors it’s critical to deliver on promises as users can simply unsubscribe if they are not happy.

If end user satisfaction is not enough to convince you that SaaS is a model to consider, then perhaps the fact that Gartner is predicting that 25 percent of new business software will include SaaS by 2011, will be convincing.