Top 25 on-demand providers

Research company IDC last month published its first-ever list of the top 25 on-demand providers, based on 2004 revenues. It's an interesting mix of the familiar, the unexpected and the obscure, although skewed by the omission of some potentially significant names. The report is called Worldwide Software on Demand 2004 Vendor Analysis: Top 25 On-Demand Providers Take Shape, by Erin Traudt and Amy Konary, and the top 25 are <drumroll>:

• WebEx Communications
• Salesforce.com
• Microsoft (Office Live Meeting)
• RightNow Technologies
• Concur Technologies
• Ultimate Software
• Taleo
• ZANTAZ
• Captiva Software
• Workscape
• WebSideStory
• Omniture
• NetSuite
• Intuit
• Critical Path
• Workstream
• Qualys
• CaseCentral
• Siebel Systems
• Coremetrics
• Intranets.com
• Kintera
• Intacct
• OpenAir
• CollabNet    (Source: IDC, 2005)

IDC sizes the total value of the market at $1.67 billion, but it's highly fragmented (if, that is, you accept the somewhat dubious premise that you can define a market for a delivery mechanism rather than for the type of service that's actually delivered). Only WebEx (with $208.4 million), Salesforce.com ($150.5 million) and Microsoft ($94.1 million) command more than a 5% share. There's a small cluster of vendors around the $40 million mark, and then it falls away rapidly, all the way downto 25th-placed CollabNet, with $5.08 million in on-demand revenues.

I also can't help wondering what the list would look like if it included companies like Google, Amazon.com and eBay. It is of course tricky to separate out the business market component of their on-demand revenues, but if anyone tries to tell me AdWords and AdSense aren't business applications for a lot of companies, then they have a very different understanding of the word 'business' than I.