Hello techies, look at your hardware...now look at mine. Now back to your hardware. Now back at mine. Now look at your's again. Sadly, it may not be like mine. But if you got rid of your old servers and legacy software and moved to the cloud, it could look like mine. Look down, now look up. Guess what techies? You are in the cloud with the man whose hardware your hardware could be like...welcome. Here in the cloud we do things differently, and so do our friends.

One of our friends named @MartinLudovic recently tweeted: "SaaS Market Expected to Grow By 25 Percent a Year Until at Least 2014 http://bit.ly/bVokNg."

What does that mean? It means that in 2009 total SaaS revenues were at about $13 billion and by 2014, that number will jump to more than $40 billion according to a recent report released by IDC. That same reports notes that legacy application revenues is likely to drop by $7 billion this year with that number set to increase each year after. The IDC report sites a few reasons for this including, "faster deployments, the lack of a need to purchase and maintain hardware, and easier upgrades."

[Learn about a large law firm moving to the cloud in this case study or check out the total cost of ownership between SaaS DMS vs. on premise DMS with this customizable TCO calculator]

Another cloud colleague named @kmarshall008 validated this report with his tweet: "Gartner Says Worldwide SaaS Revenue Within the Enterprise Application Software Market to Surpass $8.5 Billion in 2010 http://bit.ly/9uoCKk"

Yes, Gartner's estimates are a bit more conservative and are based on a tighter definition of SaaS than the IDC report, but the implications are the same. Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner described those implication in this way, "the popularity of SaaS has increased significantly within the past five years and initial concerns about security, response time and service availability have diminished for many organizations as SaaS business and computing models have matured and adoption has become more widespread." At NetDocuments we have seen this first hand with an ever increasing number of small and large companies moving to SaaS and the cloud.

I'm not gonna tell you that cloud computing will make you "dominate the competition" or "crush your opponent," mostly because I don't talk like a late-80s pro wrestler, but I will say that anything is possible when you're with the man whose hardware your hardware could be like...

Post was written by Danny Johnson of the NetDocuments marketing team with inspiration from the scholar you could study like and the man you could smell like.