AMR Research announced their annual review of the On Demand enterprise application market share and growth projections. An AMR research analyst says:

“Software-as-a-service is on fire, making sure that strong overall growth continues for the next several years.”

They see the customer relationship management (CRM) and the human capital management (HCM) markets as the fastest growing enterprise application segments with projected growth of 10% for 2006. This may look slow compared to Taleo’s growth rate above 20%, but it’s very fast compared to traditional ERP at 3%!

2006 looks like a turning point for SaaS. Not only will enterprise software move towards on demand, but desktop applications as well. We saw Google acquire Writely for online word processing and release Google Spreadsheet while the Microsoft Live product suite went beta.

Maybe it’s time to dust off the NC (network computer) announced 10 years ago by Sun and Oracle. With on demand online software, that thin client approach could become a reality tomorrow!