And it seems that CRM is the most popular SaaS application in all three countries, ahead of enterprise resource planning (ERP); content communications and collaboration (CCC); and supply chain management (SCM).

"CRM is one of the most common SaaS applications, but others such as web conferencing, e-learning, hosted email (which has existed for years and years) also lend themselves to a SaaS setup," said Pang.

Gartner thinks that CRM's popularity is likely a result of the media exposure of high-profile vendors such as salesforce.com, as well as the fact that CRM SaaS applications tend to cover a wider range of functions in common processes, such as sales automation, marketing automation and customer service support. SaaS applications such as ERP, CCC and SCM on the other hand tend to focus on specific areas of business process support such as expense management, talent management, recruitment, web conferencing and procurement.

So what can we expect for the rest of 2009? Well Pang said Gartner is planning to publish its latest SaaS forecast later this month, but he feels that we are likely to see slower adoption rates because of the slower economic climate. That said, he does not feel there will be a standstill, and there will still be movement in the market-place. "SaaS has lot more reoccurring revenues associated with it," Pang said.

The survey respondents were also pretty clear over their motivations for using or considering using SaaS in 2009. Most agreed that they choose SaaS primarily because they considered it more cost-effective than an on-premises application. Other reasons given included ease of deployment and internal resource constraints.

More than 50 percent of survey respondents saw SaaS as a viable alternative to an existing on-premises solution, and 40 percent saw SaaS as a complementary addition to their IT environments.