According to the latest Evans Data Global Development Survey, over half of all developers (51.9% averaged over all regions) expect to work on programs delivered in the SaaS model during the next 12 months. Adoption expectation is strongest in the Asia-Pacific region, although the number of developers currently working on SaaS implementations is highest in North America, where 30% say this is part of their current development efforts. In the EMEA region, fewer developers are currently developing SaaS but 53% expect to be doing so within 12 months.

Cloud computing has less traction than SaaS, with less than 10% of developers using cloud services, but over a quarter have plans to use cloud services at some point, and in the Asia-Pacific region the number expecting to is almost half.

The Global Development Survey was conducted in Fall 2008 worldwide in six different languages and consists of over 1300 in-depth interviews with developers in the major global regions.

Other highlights from the survey include:

• In the Asia-Pacific region over two-thirds of all developers (68%) spend some portion of their time writing Rich Internet Applications, though only two percent do this exclusively
• In North America, 37% say their work currently involved some type of virtualization
• In EMEA, more developers use VMware tools for virtualization, although Microsoft tools are close and both are far ahead of all other brands in usage
• Across all regions the primary obstacle to cloud computing is security